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Comment by fooker | Hacker News Reader

My next Linux laptop is going to be a Framework! Seems like a much better bet nowadays than a thinkpad.

I have a personal Framework (cheapest DIY at launch - i5-1135G7) and a ThinkPad T15 (i5-1165G7) from work; that would be recommendation too.

(I'm not claiming the slower CPU Framework is somehow faster than T15 - I just mean to say I'm not biased by the Framework having better hardware, being better on paper.)

Build quality alone is superior IMO, even if it wasn't for the glorious repairability & upgradeability. (Which is glorious, they really paid attention to that, it's not just 'RAM is not soldered down', it's attention to detail like magnetic positioning, captive screws, etc.)

I replaced my previous Thinkpad X1 carbon with a Framework 12th gen recently - vast improvement, runs Linux better than any other laptop I've ever used, I love using it, and I _love_ how repairable & upgradeable it is. Highly recommended.

Is this the one that has efficiency cores etc, how is that working?

How's the battery life

Once they offer AMD options. Until then, there's no way.

Same, but I don't care much about Team Blue vs Red. The Intel-driven power saving fiasco of the latest generation of Framework laptops is enough to keep me away.

I should not have to add weird kernel parameters or modules for my laptop not to burn through its battery during sleep.

I'm out of the loop, what was the fiasco?

These may help:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Core-i5-beats-Core-i7-Alder-La...

https://wccftech.com/intel-alder-lake-desktop-cpus-more-powe...

Basically the P CPUs are much faster than U in previous generations but are also much more power hungry. The battery life is noticably shorter on laptops with a CPU like i5-1240P. And they produce a LOT of heat. I think one CPU option for framework laptop is i5-1240P.

I see so many people thinking AMD is a better option. I see only downsides besides better price point. Why do you prefer it over Intel?

An option that's not Intel.

I was an AMD fan in the 90s, they were more enthusiast and gamer friendly, overclocking was easier, and they were generally just less enthusiast-hostile than Intel.

In the 2000's AMD all but disappeared, and with the Core2 and eventually i3/i5/i7 series, Intel was the only option, so people like me bought Intel, we had no choice.

But the second AMD came back with (Ry)Zen, I ditched Intel in a heartbeat; after years of their complacence, shitty upgrades, constantly changing sockets and ridiculous prices, there was finally a "better" option again.

This is great for everyone because it's forcing Intel to wake up, more competition and better prices, and hopefully better products from Intel.

> In the 2000's AMD all but disappeared

Say again???

In the early 2000's, AMD's Athlon trounced anything Intel had to offer and would for years.

This followed soon after with the Opteron, where AMD single-handedly switched "x86" over to 64-bit essentially overnight while Intel failed to shove Itanium and a number of other ill-fated ventures down the market's throat.

If anything, the 2000's were AMD's golden years, admittedly mostly made possible by Intel's own incompetence at the time.

I haven't bought an Intel CPU in over 15 years but I also don't think that AMD will do that much better if they are left without sufficient competition. We already saw them dropping non-pro Threadrippers, leaving an entire segment with only sidegrades. Hopefully Intel will be able to compete going forward.

>I was an AMD fan in the 90s

We are talking Amx86 to K6-3, always the worse budged/upgrade option. Nobody chose AMD for performance, overclocking or enthusiast friendliness. Price advantage evaporated in 1998 with the release of Intel Celeron https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/p_cpu.ht... ~120 yen to $1

Celeron 300A MHz 10,440 ~$90

K6-2/300 10,850 ~100

https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/newitem....

ZIDA BXi98-ATX (440BX,ATX,AGP1,PCI4,PCI/ISA1,ISA1,DIMM3) 15,800 ~$140

FIC PA2013 (MVP3,ATX,2MB,AGP1,PCI3,PCI/ISA1,ISA1,DIMM3) 2MB cache 13,800 ~$130

First K6-3 to show up in Japan was K6-III/400 at hilarious 35,500 yen aka $295!! in March 1999. Athlon shipped very late in 1999 with barely 4 months left. K6-3+ on the other hand was April 2000 at $140-180, almost twice the price of faster Celerons and Durons.

>In the 2000's AMD all but disappeared

Did you mean to say AMD started leading x86 CPU race by taking performance crown and being first to 1GHz? https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-official-amd-hits-1000mhz-... Intel wasnt happy and in turn shipped 1.13-GHz Pentium III just to recall them all due to instability https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-recalls-1-13ghz-pentium-... Faster processors, first dual core, first 64bit. First half of 2000 was when AMD started shining, only to be cut down by Intel bribing scandal - MCP (Meet Comp Program) in exchange for strict no AMD commitments. DELL, HP, pretty much all mayors took Intel $, $6 billion in kick-backs.

I might have been a little off with my timing, but assume I meant the ends of those decades and it fits perfectly.

AMD is a better option due to better price per performance per watt, mainly. There's also the added advantage of voting with your wallet against a stagnating former near-monopoly that abused its market position (they were fined for paying OEMs to only advertise Intel-based devices, but weirdly to this day Dell still continues to put Intel based devices much more prominently than AMD ones).

Regarding Thunderbolt 4, I use my Thunderbolt monitor with my fully AMD-based Asus ROG Zephyrus which is only "USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C" compatible and everything works. But i can understand that it can be a crapshoot on cheaper laptops, but isn't that the same on Intel-based cheaper laptops? If they're cheap, they probably cheaped out on getting the Thunderbolt certification.

All else being equal, it's nice to do what little I can to support a competitive CPU market.

What downsides do you see?

I begrudgingly switched to Intel some time ago because of Thunderbolt 4 and AMD's lack of support for Thunderbolt in general, especially in budget-friendly lines (around $1000 USD in my case). There were also weird virtualization issues with AMD compared to Intel.

Now it's getting better, so I'd consider it for my next laptop, but for those who dock a ton of peripherals and monitors, I recommend strict Thunderbolt 4 compliance - which again, I hope more AMD-powered machines can bring to bear.

You can always get an AMD machine with a separate thunderbolt controller.

I am a dev with the need to virtualize ALOT. My main driver is also a Linux based system. I had to use a ThinkPad T14 2021 (maxed out AMD version) before I switch employees. It was a horrible experience:

* virtualization issues left and right. Everything was working but weird behavior from time to time. Like random performance degradation, rare crashes and mostly compatibility issues with experimental stuff (e.g. Integrated gpu pass through was not possible with AMDs at the time)

* battery life sucked (ironically this should be an Intel Issue)

* standby was not working as expected

* no support for Display Link

* Thunderbolt 4 (huge issue for me)

Now I am on the Framework i7 11 Gen and all the issues are gone. Yes Battery life could be better but it was way worse with the AMD.

Quoting another person here, seems like there are some big issues with Intel CPU's when it comes to laptops

"These may help:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Core-i5-beats-Core-i7-Alder-La...

https://wccftech.com/intel-alder-lake-desktop-cpus-more-powe...

1. Efficiency, and 2. Integrated graphics power.

Conversely, what is the advantage of Intel, other than peak boost performance (at vastly higher wattage)?

Because it is not Intel.

Monopolies are bad.

AMD CPUs are much better for laptop as they tend to scale better at acceptable power draw levels for something battery powered while retaining good performance. Intel has the lead on the low power/low performance stuff.

I dunno man, the glossy screens on the Framework are a no go for me. Also no AMD as well.

ThinkPads are expensive but at least I can get them with Ryzens and matt displays.

I added a matte screen plastic cover, it does the job perfectly and protect the screen from scratches for ~21€ But yeah, I wish they would let buyers choose it as an option directly. https://viascreens.com/screen-protector/framework/laptop-13-...

for me the deal breaker is physical mouse buttons, including middle mouse click. Thinkpads have them to support their nipple mouse (which i don't care about), but I don't want a laptop without the buttons (i like the physical left click for drag and drop, and middle click for internet browsing). Lots of laptops that have come out in recent years are pretty tempting, but most of them don't have the mouse buttons

You should not use a laptop trackpad for any significant amount of time anyway, if you care about RSI and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

sometimes I'm in a car or train, though

And I'll add to that that the number of ports is disappointing. I like their system of flexible ports, but they should really have made the module large enough to support 2 ports in one module. 4 ports total seems like the bare minimum if you are not going to use a dock.

I currently have an AMD Thinkpad and would not get another to run Linux. For most of the life of the laptop battery life has been horrible. In the last year it has been better but still nowhere near as good as it is with Windows. AMD and Lenovo are both aware it is an issue, it is not restricted to this Thinkpad, but neither care enough to devote resources to tracking down and resolving the cause. I'm guessing because the Linux laptop market isn't large enough for them to devote the resources to.

Interesting, it's the other way around for me with screens. Glossy screens have better colors and text looks crispier to me, something about the lack of diffusion around character's borders. I honestly don't know how matte screens are still a thing: you can always turn a smooth surface into matte with a screen protector, but not the opposite.

I used ThinkPads before too and swapped to tuxedo books now. They make laptops specifically for Linux and even provide software updates etc. For Linux. I'm quite happy, but it's more expensive.

I've done this too, mainly because of the limited RAM upgrade options in the ThinkPad T series (only one free slot and one soldered).

But one must be aware that tuxedo doesn't "make" laptops in the narrower sense. They're a Schenker reseller and while I'm overall satisfied with my tuxedo the build quality isn't close to ThinkPads T or X series.

If you want a good thinkpad that you can just beat up (you know, a rescue) then they still have a very apropo use case.

The killer feature would be if framework design their motherboards so that they also happen to fit in the older rock-solid Thinkpads - that'll pretty much bring them all back to being modern machines with full power and unbeatable build quality.

I'm really tempted, but thinkpads are still just about edging ahead for me

(1) Entirely subjective, but I think they look better (2) I like the trackpoint and (3) AMD is an option. I dont have any problem with intel cpu's, but amd provides far better igpu's, certainly enough to play a lot of games at lower settings.

How does the keyboard compare? Out of genuine interest because I'm likely to do the same.

ThinkPad Keyboards are generally waterproof. The framework keyboard is not. And it has no red mouse dot. However it feels nice and is even easier to replace than the Thinkpad one if needed.

Replaced my Thinkpad with a framework a few months ago and as long as I don't spill my drink over it, it looks like I will enjoy the framework a long time.

It looks like the framework laptop keyboard is missing PgUp and PgDn keys (I use them constantly).

Slightly off topic. But when I got my first 60% keyboard I started using the SpaceFN layout (via TouchCursor on Windows) and never looked back. Even on larger keyboards.

SpaceFN turns your space bar into a meta key, and arrows/home/end/pgup/pgdown are all reachable from the home row. I can't go back.

You can't use it in application that need to know if your holding down the spacebar (graphic design software, games). I switch it off for those. But otherwise I haven't had any issues (besides TouchCursor, which is buggy and need a restart every now and then).

Having navigational keys on the home row is something every software developer should use (but almost no one does). Unlike Vim-style keybindings it just works everywhere.

Personally I am using an unused key on my keyboard (layout) as modifier to access them. My particular mapping is based on the Neo Layout [0]. Basically FPS-style WASD but shifted by one key to the right.

As tool to change keyboard layout I use Interception Tools [1] and a personal C program. The advantage of interception tools is that it works everywhere (even outside a desktop environment).

[0]: https://www.neo-layout.org/ – It's a German page, but you can look at "Ebene 4" on the keyboard thingy to see the layout.

[1]: https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/tools

Thank you, this makes so much sense! I use Neo2 on a 75%, longer learning curve but absolutely worth it IMHO. Sadly the docs are only german, think i'll have to do something about it.

https://neo-layout.org/

On Linux there is NEO-qwerty, which gives you the layers minus the ergonomic enchancements and learning curve.

I do something similar on MacOS with Karabiner, instead of the Spacebar I use the Caps Lock to become a Meta-key (Cmd + Ctrl + Opt + Shift).

Does it not do Fn+ArrowUp/Down like any other laptop without dedicated PgUp/Down keys?

It does

I crossed so many good laptops from my buy list because of some silly keyboard decisions (oh, Asus), and MacBook fellas shrug on my complaints :)

Somewhat small.

Gen 11 appears to have had some quality issues (general freezing) and Gen 12 was able tk resolve over time.

Frameworks run a tad hot on Linux as well

They run hot in general, from what I have read. I am typing on one running linux right now. ~45c with minimal load.

No trackpoint, oversized trackpad, I think I'll stick with my modified X230 for the time being. An AMD option also wouldn't hurt but its not as big of a priority for me as a trackpoint.

"modified X230"

What kind of modification?

Replace the keyboard and palm rest with an X220 keyboard and palm rest.

I believe there are also other modifications you can do like fitting a higher resolution screen (requires soldering). But I haven't gotten that far yet.

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