Framework 13 AMD 7040 Series: A Developer's First Impressions | Hacker News Reader

Framework 13 AMD 7040 Series: A Developer's First Impressions

zach.codes

181 pointszackify188 comments

I'm happy to help answer questions folks have on the product.

We (without intending to) ended up being among the first to ship a Ryzen 7040 U-series laptop, which means Linux support is early and depends on having the right kernel version. As others have noted in the comments, we were in a similar place when we were one of the earlier ones on both 12th Gen Intel Core and 13th Gen Intel Core, and both matured rapidly.

AMD continues to improve things with each release, and we've sent hardware to folks at Canonical for Ubuntu and Red Hat for Fedora to help speed along the process of having the out of the box experience with popular distros be smooth.

Is there any hope for the wifi bugs mentioned in the article?

I was trying to avoid reviews like this because I didn't want to be thinking about all the problems instead of looking forward to my new laptop.

I am now wondering if I should have gone Intel.

I don’t want to sway people from the WiFi issues.

I saw others in the forums without problems.

I can definitely say for sure, I ran at least 20 speed tests between it and two phones in the same locations and had much lower bandwidth on it.

Hoping this is just an amd issue that will get better.

i feel like the wifi issues are kind of overblown, i mean 300 down is still blazing fast -- but that is just my usage

Yeah exactly. Like it sucks because I have 6E and it can’t really use it, but it’s only a big deal when transferring large files on my network.

I wonder if this could be due to regulatory domain at all?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Network_configuration/Wirel...

6E didn't work on my Elitebook until I set it from global to my local country. But completely different WiFi chip.

I currently get 600 using an Intel AX201 card and 900 from a better router.

The intel stack is more mature right now as someone pointed out in the comments above. Down the road AMD will get better with better drivers and newer chips. If wifi speeds matter to someone and they are upgrading from an older intel board then keeping the old wifi card would make sense as of now.

As the original poster noted, this seems to be an interaction between the specific access point or router and the AMD RZ616 driver, and not something that other users are seeing on their home networks.

The RZ616 is AMD's rebrand of MediaTek MT7921K. Mediatek does have a dedicated team working on Linux drivers, but we haven't seen their or AMD's plans: https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/mediatek

All of that said, 13th Gen Intel Core and specifically Intel AX210 WiFi are quite mature in Linux, and Ryzen 7040 U-series and RZ616 are quite new. All indications and communication we've had with AMD point to them having a strong desire to deliver a great Linux experience.

So my Framework laptop is currently in transit. In theory, I would just swap the AMD wifi card with an 25 euro Intel AX210?

Try the card first but yes, you can do that.

Yep this should be possible AIUI funnily enough, it is not possible on the Intel models.

You can also replace the MediaTek RZ616 with a Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 card, which is equally supported by AMD and default on their Ryzen Pro models. I’m very happy with mine, got it from eBay.

You are probably in a better place than me to really push them on Linux support.

Mediatek's Linux support seems reasonable, but I've only had experience running the AP cards in OpenWRT, not the little baby client cards.

FWIW I use my MT7921K as an access point. It can only do one frequency at a time (2.4/5/6GHz), and I haven't tested the 6GHz capabilities, but I've not had much trouble with it so far.

Do Intel or AMD forbid you from mixing and matching wifi cards ? Why the unnecessary fragmentation ?

There is no specific commercial restriction preventing us from mixing and matching, but there is also no commercial/technical support from either party around the mixed solution. That means that if any issues come up, we have no path to resolving them, including crucially if we ran into issues during RF certifications.

iirc Intel has a line of cards that only work on their CPU lines and otherwise, Intel seems to have soft blocked their compatible cards from OEMs - we can't get AMD laptops with Intel nics anymore where I work from all vendors.

Otherwise nope - I run Intel ax cards in all of my laptops (HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, surface laptop 4 -- came with Intel) and they are solid in windows and Linux.

> Intel has a line of cards that only work on their CPU lines

Intel sells CNVi versions of their WiFi module lineups that only work on chipsets that support it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi

I bought MT7921K on a PCIe card for two older PCs and they work fine, AX210 is better but Mediatek is not bad - between two of them on 6GHz they managed >1Gbps and didn't lock up at all even after 200GB.

Just had to use at least Linux 6.1 or newer and had to set regulator domain manually... Compiling upstream mt76 enabled even more stability and also enabled AP+STA operation.

i've got the Intel AX210 WiFi/BT (bundled with asrock b650e pg-itx). as for WiFi it worked out of box, but the drivers for BT are horrible, some of my devices aren't recognized (while bt-usb dongle works fine), and there are plenty of other issues like disconnecting or buffering keystrokes from keyboard.. so i've had to disable the Intel AX210 combo in bios, to keep my system stable. for the WiFi part it's ok, otherwise i'd recommend to wait for better BT support on linux.

Curious as to what the second vent on the right of the chassis is for? A second fan placement? Just a passing curiosity as I noticed it when assembling!

That vent is for air intake.

Do you have plans for automating the BIOS updates?

At the moment, my Intel 12th gen mainboard BIOS has several vulnerabilities and many people are waiting for updates.

In a couple of years, you will have to support even more mainboards and I hope you are working on software infrastructure to properly support that.

I shared an update around that earlier today in our Community: https://community.frame.work/t/12th-gen-intel-core-bios-3-06...

I noticed at the Kernel Recipes conference in Paris that Greg KH has a frame.work laptop and when I asked him he was very happy about it.

Do you ship early models to linux kernel developpers and may be distribution developpers?

We’ve shipped a handful of pre-release units to folks at Canonical, Red Hat, and Manjaro for QA/compatibility testing. We have seen a much larger number of people involved in kernel or distro development pick up released systems on their own.

Any idea when you could do an Intel or AMD device with coreboot?

And a trackpoint! I'd buy those sight unseen.

Hmm I wonder if that could just be a simple keyboard replacement given the modularity of the Frameworks.

I recall reading somewhere that there's a height issue (a keyboard with a trackpoint would need more height than what's available).

(I'm not a trackpoint user, but I like the extra set of three standalone mouse buttons which usually come with a trackpoint; the middle mouse button is particularly useful, since it's not usually available on a trackpad.)

You can usually do a three finger tap for middle mouse which isn’t as convenient but it works

Thanks for taking the time to appear here, give in depth answers, and still be a human face on the company.

My non-technical wife's laptop is needing replacement. I was going to buy a second hand thinkpad, but if enough stars align, a framework might be a good option.

How was the experience from not being acknowledge by AMD, because you were not big enough, to going to be the first once shipping their new flagship laptop CPU after all their other customers moved their timeline out? I imagine their willingness to support you did increase in the last few months?

Eagerly awaiting my batch to ship. Very happy that I see a great team being in charge of this product.

Also thanks for being proactive in supporting the Linux community.

AMD is a smaller company than you might expect, which drives them to need to focus. Once they got internal alignment to work with us though, they were all in from the start of kicking off the program.

Very nice to hear that they are able to provide good support to you. I don't work with AMD but other SoC vendors and this is always a bit of a challenge (The Q on how important you are to their business / bottom line).

So one of the major things holding me of buying a framework is the screen. There have been sounds in the community asking for an upgraded screen option (500+ nits/HDR, 120hz, higher res etc) for years. Is this just something you guy aren't interested in at all? Or is it too hard sourcing panels, or even sourcing panels that fit the framework case?

Reluctantly bought a MacBook Air few days back, literally trying to somehow use my too old last MacBook Air while I waited/hope for something like a Framework laptop. But then I eventually realised that being in a third world country means the enthusiast initiatives would never reach you in time and when they do they’d probably be obsolete, out of practical use and irrelevant for various reasons. Maybe that’s one of the reasons for not focusing on such markets.

My FW 12th gen still shuts down during sleep, same issue as tons and tons of other people here: https://community.frame.work/t/laptop-shuts-down-during-slee...

It seems like I got the least supported mainboard, which kind of sucks. If I knew this one was unsupported I would have just bought the 11th gen.

I love the HW design and modularity and there are FW problems with like every laptop ever but it doesn't change how much this problem sucks.

Just wanted to reply to you once more.

I’ve seen multiple other forum users unable to update fingerprint sensors in Linux with the same problem I had.

Also I’ve seen threads asking why Ubuntu freezes and if anyone else is having problems.

You guys explained in 1 forum post that amd is working on a fix for the second issue, and nobody has really mentioned the fwupd freezes some of us run into.

It’s just one more example of stuff in too many places. The official Ubuntu install guide doesn’t mention a new fix is coming to fix freezes and the place that does is a forum post that many people may miss.

Need 1 hub page for each device with some sort of stream of updates.

I have to bookmark the bios guide page to find out if new ones are out, a forum post to see if there is new changes with Ubuntu, stuff is a little far apart and manual process to find updates.

I wonder what kind of battery-life Framework users get?

I've recently gotten an Elitebook 845 G10 which runs on a Ryzen 7 Pro 7840HS, and battery life was at first shit. The issue was with the BIOS being bugged and not allowing ASPM. After manually activating, I now get around 12-15 hours on a 50Wh battery, depending on use of course. Results still preliminary though, more testing needs to be done.

Btw, I chose the Elitebook because it actually features great repairability. Pretty much everything can be swapped out, including memory. I was reluctant to buy HP, mostly due to the reputation they earned with their printer business shenanigans, but so far don't regret the purchase at all. In fact I like this device more and more.

Pretty much everything worked out of the box with ArchLinux, except for ASPM, which I was able to fix within a couple hours.

edit: Oh and the main motivation behind preferring the Elitebook over the Framework was the price. I mean really? Upgrade to 7840 almost 400 Euro? Lenovo charges like 80 Euro for that. For 1200 Euro I got the aforementioned CPU with a beautiful 120hz, 500nits, 2560x1600 screen, 2x16GB 5600 DDR5 SO-DIMM, 1TB NVME, etc. But it was a student offer.

I have the 845 g9, and I'm lukewarm about it. It's more to do with AMD than HP, but HP also has a few annoyances.

- No insert key

- No external display before OS. Can't do luks password over external monitor.

- Miscellaneous AMD bugs: vp9 hw decoding broken, s2idle sleep fails occasionally, gets stuck in lowest frequency sometimes, several others that have slowly been fixed on mainline

- Battery life is pretty mediocre. 5-6 hours of browsing, 2-3 hours of video.

The insert key seems to be fn-f10 now. I have to say I don't really ever use it? What do people use it for, if I may ask? I configure everything to use vim-style editing, so maybe that's why.

I can't really speak on the display stuff, but I fell like I saw something related to that in the BIOS. Haven't had issues with sleep either, but maybe because I've only been using the machine for 2 days.

About the battery, I really wonder if ASPM is off for you as well? It seems to be a common theme among HP Laptops. My battery life nearly doubled when I set it up.

What is your output of

    $ sudo dmesg | grep ASPM

(if you use Linux?)

Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins works more universally than Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V across Windows and Linux.

I believe the Ctrl-Ins etc came from IBM while Ctrl+C/V/X started as Cmd-C/V/X on the Apple Lisa.

ctrl + shift + ins doesn't work on this laptop. That's what I use to paste in the terminal. You can also do ctrl + shift + v, which I am trying to learn now. I also see a bunch of spurious corrected aer messages, for which I've had to add a noaer kernel boot arg. On ASPM, maybe PCIe ASPM doesn't work ? Not sure. Here's dmesg.

[ 0.362132] ACPI FADT declares the system doesn't support PCIe ASPM, so disable it

[ 0.468451] acpi PNP0A08:00: _OSC: OS supports [ExtendedConfig ASPM ClockPM Segments MSI EDR HPX-Type3]

[ 0.468617] acpi PNP0A08:00: FADT indicates ASPM is unsupported, using BIOS configuration

[ 5757.416672] pcieport 0000:00:04.1: ASPM: current common clock configuration is inconsistent, reconfiguring

That's exactly what mine showed when ASPM wasn't enabled. Before that I got at most about 9 hours doing nothing, after enabling it I got about 14 hours even doing light webbrowsing and such.

I made a Reddit post about it today, enabling it under Linux manually. Many people have been complaining about low battery life on the Elitebook 845 G10, and most people suspected missing ASPM support to be the culprit. The nice thing is, under Linux you can force it, even if the BIOS doesn't offer it. I'm still testing though, so it is pretty experimental. You can find instructions on what I did here, if you're interested: https://old.reddit.com/r/AMDLaptops/comments/16lz0oh/anyone_...

Apologies, it is a pretty long post.

e: And I don't know if this generalizes to G9 laptops

Thanks. I'll try this out. For my next purchase, I'm going to stick to an Intel Thinkpad. I still use my 10 year old T530, and I bought this to replace it, but I still find myself using the T530 most of the time.

Thank you very much for that, my G9 hovers around 5 W idle which is not great. I will try these tweaks.

Note that there is a GUI app called "Power Statistics" that shows the evolution of power consumption on battery quite well. It still uses data reported by the battery which is not super accurate but works well enough when looking at say an hour of data points.

Unfortunately no clear improvement for me after applying these tweaks.

> What do people use it for, if I may ask? I configure everything to use vim-style editing, so maybe that's why.

To toggle overwrite mode in word processors, and funnily enough, in vim.

It's muscle memory now. Pres "i" to start writing, use insert to toggle between "REPLACE/INSERT" mode.

If I accidentally enable overwrite mode I suppose this would be useful to disable it quickly

> No external display before OS. Can't do luks password over external monitor.

Just a guess, but is the monitor over HDMI or USB C / Thunderbolt? If the later, there may be BIOS settings to enable it before boot is completed (IIRC on Dells it's disabled).

Yeah, it's behind a dock. I'll check the bios. IIRC, I had tried various settings in the bios to no avail.

Most of that sounds like it's HP design / bios so it's again on HP. check for a bios update or settings for display

> - No external display before OS. Can't do luks password over external monitor.

That's weird. I have the g8 and there is no such issue. I routinely type my LUKS password on my external keyboard and monitor. The only thing that doesn't show up on the external screen IIRC is the boot selection menu.

I can confirm, I have the G9 using my monitor as a dock (thanks USB-C :) and I can type LUKS passwords on it just fine.

I have the same laptop, and while the BIOS/UEFI indeed doesn't activate any external monitors, Linux does it during boot before LUKS password prompt for me… not sure what the difference is? I'm on kernel 6.4.

There's also a firmware upgrade (the kind in /lib/firmware, not the kind in flash memory on the card) for the QCNFA765 wifi card that you have to install, which fixes both a lot (probably not all) of the s2idle issues, and gives a little bit of battery life. I found this out with some s0ix test tool that I now can't find… anyway, it should say in dmesg:

  ath11k_pci 0000:01:00.0: fw_version 0x110b196e fw_build_timestamp 2022-12-22 12:54 fw_build_id WLAN.HSP.1.1-03125-QCAHSPSWPL_V1_V2_SILICONZ_LITE-3.6510.23

Also, as some siblings already posted, Insert is on Fn+F10, which does indeed suck… but funnily enough it is also (undocumented?) on Fn+E, where it was on previous HP Elitebooks. I find that slightly more useful due to being reachable one-handed…

Maybe it's some interaction with the dock ? My external monitor is behind the hp tb4 dock. The wifi firmware is just the linux firmware, right ? I use Fedora, so it should be pretty up to date. s2idle is mostly fine, it's just that it'll randomly fail to sleep and the laptop will have a drained battery the next day when I open it.

> Miscellaneous AMD bugs: vp9 hw decoding broken

This is so annoying, I use a Firefox extension for Youtube called "Your Codecs." that allows to block VP9 so I can keep hardware decoding on without having random GPU crashes.

I've got the 13th gen intel model so can't talk about amd battery life but I can get at least 4 hours out of the battery most of the time and for me that's good since I tend to be running between 1 and 4 vms constantly humming away using cpu cycles. I have played with tlp and bet if I lightened my load and capped the cpu I'd be able to get 6 to 8 hours without an issue but I bought the thing for the speed so I'll stick with it zooming along instead of a long battery life.

4 hours isn’t awful but still isn’t great unfortunately.

I hope to get a few more good years out my MacBook Pro (m1 Pro).

The thing is fast and I can do a full 8 hour work day with VSCode, IntelliJ, and docker running a ton of stuff:

- a couple MySQL instances - multiple elastic search and Kibana instances - Haproxy - a few Nginx + PHP containers - a node container with frontend dev build - logstash - a couple rust services

I can close the lid and come back the next day having lost essentially no battery life, and everything running just as I left it.

Do use energy saver for that?

I have the 845 G8 and can echo most of your sentiment. It's a fast, well made and easily repairable/upgradable machine (ie. no soldered RAM modules).

However, HP's software is less than stellar. What annoys me the most is the fact that the latest BIOS update completely broke USB-C dock and monitor detection.

I'm typing this on one of those, and on paper it's indeed a nice little machine. But oh my god, the screen is ridiculously bad. When I got it a few years ago, I didn't think it was still possible to have such atrocious screens on a 1500+ € machine...

Also, assembly quality seems hit or miss with these. Mine is OK, but on the one from work, the black plastic surrounding the screen is misaligned with the hinge.

Oh yeah, the ghosting on that screen is terrible, I have never seen such a bad screen.

But then again, I mostly use it with an external monitor, so I don't care that much.

Does the fingerprint reader work? I've never had one work in Linux. Can you login with it?

Yes it worked out of the box with fprint https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/fprint

I use it for login and sudo. The placement of the reader could be better. On my old ThinkPad it was right next to the keyboard, on the Elitebook it is below it for some reason.

> The only real knock I can give framework on all of this, is having so many fixes in so many places.

This. By now, I have set up and maintained enough installations of diverse open / hobbyist products (e.g. Debian, Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant, Mixxx, Jellybean, Nextcloud... ) to come to the conclusion that an unorganized, unmaintained, laissez-fair user community democrized potpourri of "knowledge bases" quickly becomes a huge issue.

It sucks to have to hunt around a multitude of issue trackers, wikis, discussion forums, mailing list archives, Gitlab pages, web sites etc. to find solutions.

Sometimes, it is comment #297 in some paginated forum thread that helped, as previous nonworking answers in the same thread related to another software release version, using and referencing a different setup implicitly referencing comment #246 a couple of pages before.

We publish a compatibility overview and step by step guides for popular distros specifically to avoid that: https://frame.work/linux

I think what would help me a lot more, if I had to do this again, is a specific article only for the amd framework with everything you need to do after.

For instance, the fingerprint sensor, it’s a red note on a step, sure, but it’s kind of hard to go through every guide and read all these “if you are on X version of the platform”

Compared to knowing you are reading a guide 100% for the platform you have, less stuff in the way that isn’t applicable and less likely to miss important things.

Also, there is no knowledge base article at all for flashing red lights and I have to find a forum post to move the foam back into place. Would be good to get a page up with the light codes for red flashing.

Even the fingerprint pam setup that is required for use in 1Password and others, is at the bottom of another guide I found in a forum post, might be wrong here but it’s worth noting some of these

Love what you’ve been doing overall

Thanks for the feedback! The foam positioning issue you ran into is definitely not good, and I've flagged it to our Supplier Quality Manager.

I second this. Linux support is good but I feel forum fatigue too.

Or even shoving some checks in a shell script to automate figuring out which issues apply.

I've had my Framework 12 over a year now, so maybe I can give some perspective. I had a lot of similar issues (mostly with wifi) running Fedora when I first got it. I also felt like I wasted a lot of time getting it set up and fixing little bugs here and there.

But I'm happy to say that after the first two weeks or so, it's been rock solid. The issues I had with wifi were patched pretty quickly, and everything else pretty much just works with the default configuration. The only thing is the battery life is still bad, partly because I have way too much RAM...

> The only thing is the battery life is still bad, partly because I have way too much RAM...

Can you actually tell the difference the RAM quantity has on battery life?

I have a different laptop with an older zen 3 part, as well as its cousin with an 11th gen i7. I haven't noticed any change in battery life, going from 32 to 64 GB on the AMD and from 16 to 32 on the Intel.

There's a small impact with larger capacities, but mostly it's memory speed and channels that have the biggest impact. Here's some testing posted in the Framework community forums from a couple years ago: https://community.frame.work/t/battery-life-impact-of-ram-me...

Buying a new laptop and running Linux pretty much always requires running mainline kernels for a few weeks or months until things get fixed. Same thing happens for ThinkPad and others.

I’m looking forward to solutions with Linux that are vertically integrated. I know System76 is moving in this direction, but Apple will remain the king in this area in the near future. Without vertical integration it’s a mess, no party wants to control the end to end experience and take responsibility.

100% agree. At this price point who has the time to debug wifi?!

Only the people writing wifi drivers, and students trying to figure out how things work for the novelty.

And yet every time I post running Linux on a modern laptop as a daily driver is not a good idea I get heavily downvoted.

Complaining about downvotes is a downvotable offense :)

(FWIW I agree with you, Linux on laptops is a recipe for pain)

I've been running my 12th Gen Intel Framework for just over a year (since I got it) with Linux (KDE Neon). Bluetooth, expansion cards, thunderbolt, wifi - literally no issues. I haven't even had to fiddle with it. I use it all day for work (software engineering - lots of VM's and browser tabs) and all evening for Minecraft and movies. When I'm at my desk at home it's plugged in to a Thunderbolt 4 dock driving two monitors and getting Gigabit network speed.

Before that I had a brand new Dell XPS 13, which again I had for a little over a year, running KDE Neon. It wasn't used for work as much, but again it worked perfectly fine, including the touch screen I didn't even want on it (okay- a major issue was the battery life, which was atrocious).

Neither of these even came with Linux installed.

Disagree, depending on what you mean by modern. A model that just came out that includes freshly released hardware? Unless it's a Dell Developer Edition or similar that comes with a Linux distro preinstalled and is thus tested, yeah, there might be driver issues.

Otherwise stuff just mostly works. Some due diligence ahead is a good idea to ensure there's no problematic hardware though.

Probably because it depends on the modern laptop.

I bought my current daily driver when mobile Zen 3 parts were still new. Arch supported it 100% without any random tweaks since day one. As a comparison, Windows only figured out how to work the webcam about a year later...

There are brands selling preinstalled laptop, this is the way to go if you want to be 100% sure of a supported laptop. There is a curated list at this page: https://linuxpreloaded.com/

If you spend a lot of your time working in/with Linux, I think it's fine. If you don't, you soon will.

All the time: I use WSL. The right tool for the right job. Linux userspace for development -- but Windows for the kernel because that's where the drivers are.

Wi-fi basically works across the board. System76 cares about fan curves and other mechanical/electrical details. Battery life is easy to call out, but I’d say that the work being done now is more nuanced.

I think battery life is one area vertical integration really helps. If all the hardware and firmware don't play nice, sleep and other power savings doesn't work right (at least in my experience). You'll have one rogue device preventing the machine from or some hardware missing software daemon power management config.

Me.

Ironically enough, my Dell laptop arrived without a working wifi card. They had a bios update at some point which made it less crap, but I had to replace it after the nth time where it seemingly just randomly turned itself off /hard crashed.

Now that I think of it, I must have some really bad luck. Every single laptop I have owned, has has a wifi issue at some point.

Purism is another company that ships GNU/Linux laptops with their own OS.

Running Ubuntu 22.04.1 on a very recent device is not something I would recommend.

And it is particularly bad timing. 23.10 was released yesterday, so a new kernel should roll into 22.04 soon. It would also fix most of the software complaints if the auther would have used 23.10.

Please save yourself from the hassle of compiling a kernel, especially for Ubuntu (the userspace _expects_ Ubuntu patches, e.g. for apparmor). Pick a distro with a recent release, and for Ubuntu in particular check if you can live with 2 upgrades a year until you reach the next LTS (April of even years, so right now the _next_ upgrade. Worst case is 3 upgrades).

I'd recommend openSUSE Tumbleweed. Today is the first time in years an update broke something for me. Could use the built in snapshotting to roll back but i think this is a good opportunity to switch to Slowroll to try it out. Can rollback later.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/openSUSE-Slowroll

Ubuntu probably has some ppas where someone's done that for you with newer kernel versions. I wouldn't necessarily want an LTS distro for new hardware. On the other hand, my Fedora desktop breaks quite a bit from kernel updates (usually amdgpu)

I did this because it’s what framework is specifically having us do right now.

Using this special oem kernel on 22.04.3

I just got this device on Monday, been waiting for over half a year for it.

I love it, but also wow, so many random things I have had to do the past few days.

I think this provides a good prospective compared to all the mainstream posts about it that aren't going in depth on linux and the usability on there at this current time.

Overall, I love this device!

The testing for Linux will require a few more weeks of delay due to a BIOS issue.

"AMD Ryzen Powered Framework Laptop Linux Testing Held Up By BIOS Issue"

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Framework-Linux-Hold

Thanks for the article, I thought it was very helpful! You mentioned it a little bit, but is the trackpad better on wayland? How does it compare to a MBP?

And finally, can you dock the framework laptop to a USB-C docking station for external monitor support? I haven’t seen a lot of reviews mention this and I’m curious what that looks like today.

I just tried plugging into a caldigit dock, and it didn't work. I am not sure why.

The env in general uses wayland but certain apps don't. In those apps you don't have good gesture support.

I would say its 80-85% as good as a mac trackpad when wayland is on everything

By the way, what is that "two finger swipe back and forth in a web browser" that you are missing from a Mac? I use the keyboard a lot and the touchpad only to move the pointer and scroll, so I'm pretty ignorant about the matter.

I have my amd framework hooked up to a Lenovo 27" monitor over USB c and that daisy chained to another of the same monitor type over display link and it works like a champ: USB, video, Ethernet, and power all through the one cable.

Though it did NOT work out of the box to a display link USB A dock. I think it needs display link kernel module and I didn't want to bother.

I found that on Debian 12 (13th Intel Framework 13) connecting a 4K external display via HDMI is definitely more stable than USB-C. I also tried some Windows games with Steam Play and HDMI enables higher resolutions on the display (that was not the case with USB-C, I don’t know why).

Would you have the same experience if some gave you a Thinkpad instead? Seems like most issues are Linux related and non-Linux users would have the most sooprise about having to config/diy/hack/tweak/script something. No?

I'm currently in the queue for one of these, and was expecting there to be some minor issues like these (fingerprint sensor, some driver/kernel related performance issues) as is often the case when running desktop Linux.

The difference between Framework and other laptop manufacturers however is that it has shown that it is actively tackling these issues, and so I'm not so worried.

Couple that with the fact that components are upgradable, I am not so worried about being let down by this machine once I get it (I won't feel locked in to a unchanging brick). It is still early days for this company and product, so my expectations about a hiccup free experience are tempered (I'm sure the first 80's Machintosh or 90's Thinkpads were less than perfect).

My one strong hope though is that this form factor will be able to get a slightly larger battery in the near future.

Power management is where the framework laptops really suffer under Linux.

I truly prefer Linux as an OS but my framework goes unused in favor of my MacBook Air because the former simply can’t hold a charge for more than a few days of standby or a few hours of use. I believe it’s the WiFi firmware which is known to have bad power management support on Linux.

> can’t hold a charge for more than a few days of standby

I don't own a Framework, but also have the battery draining for no reason issue on mine. I think the cause is the new "modern standby", where the laptop doesn't actually sleep. Windows mitigates this by switching to hibernation if you leave it "asleep" for a while and unplugged.

It might be worth trying the mem_sleep_default=deep kernel parameter

Yeah, I tried this and a bunch of other things, it ignores them.

I also have its cousin, with an 11th gen i7. It actually exposes a choice in one of those parameters, between s3 and s2idle. If I switch it to s3 and attempt to make it sleep, it just hangs.

Neither has an option to control this in the BIOS, like some Lenovos do, from what I hear.

I have a Lenovo X1 running Windows and it dies after a day or so of sleep too, sometimes sooner. As the other poster says, I think this is mostly due to modern chipsets getting rid of S3 and having "modern standby" instead.

Had this happen on my T14. I switched the sleep BIOS setting to Linux to bring back S3 sleep in Windows and stop using modern standby.

For what it's worth, the latest ThinkPads don't have S3 as an option in the BIOS anymore.

Good to know, I have a first gen, I'll keep that in mind when I need to upgrade

Linux overall trackpad support is WAY better now than 5 years ago, but gnome/kde/drivers have room to grow to be as good as Apple. Framework is getting close though to my ideal laptop. The Dell XPS line is also a good linux choice too.

AFAICT in Fedora there's still no way to change the track pad scroll gesture speed. For me it's super annoying

> For modern apps not using Wayland…. full gesture support, fractional scaling, etc doesn’t work. After fixing firefox, I noticed Slack was incredibly fuzzy…. it doesn’t use Wayland.

Every time I read stuff like this I feel like a bit of a outlier, because in all the years I've been using Slack, I've never used it as anything other than a web application (despite occasionally being pestered to download the Electron version).

I already have a perfectly good browser, what's the point of running another one (with potential compatibility issues) just for Slack?

Screen sharing and huddles

Browser version can also do both.

Not in Firefox (to my great annoyance)

I use Firefox, and I don't have issues sharing the screen with Discord

Screen sharing works in Firefox, but sometimes the (terrible) websites/apps only care about Chromium, even though it'd work on Firefox.

I'm the same. I only run slack and discord in the browser

After switching from an 11th gen Intel Dell XPS, to a M1 Macbook, I resist returning to PC laptops (even though I prefer Windows) until someone confirms that newer Ryzen and Intel chips are comparable in terms of "perceived performance" to Apple silicon. The whole laptop simply becomes syrupy on battery. Even if I go high performance mode in Windows settings, the whole device is just so laggy compared to a Macbook. And, in high performance mode, the laptop has probably at _most_ 2 hours of battery life in it.

Has this improved since 11th gen Intel?

I'm on a 6850U Ryzen Windows machine and it's really smooth. Previously I too was using an 11th gen XPS 13 but on Linux, where battery was approximately 2 hours long. This machine feels both smooth, cool and for my usages there's no slowdowns on battery either (usually running few browser windows, a VM that's not taxed too hard and an IDE).

Good to know! I almost wonder if my specific laptop is broken in some way. Either that, or I'm overly sensitive to these things. And the Venn diagram overlap of people who often use both macOS and Windows is probably not that large... :) I don't see many people talking about this!

and how many hours of battery you get on this ryzen?

Brand new laptop so haven't got a chance to really get a good sense of an average. I think depending on the workload I got 9-12 hours thus far.

I tried Ubuntu Linux on a Framework 13th generation intel laptop. Very smooth even on battery. Might be the OS ...

Ditto. Would love a windows laptop this good but nothing I've had has ever come close. It's always low battery or high heat or bulky.

I hope we get bootcamp on Apple silicon, so we can see if it's the hardware or the OS that's causing most of the trouble :D

Problem is not performance but battery life.

> I noticed Slack was incredibly fuzzy…. it doesn’t use Wayland.

People should stop using that crappy Electron Apps, that does exactly the same thing that opening a webapp page on a tab of your browser. Seriously, you are wasting RAM and CPU (and battery) doing that. And this it's totally independent of you using Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD...

I use Slack and Discord from the web browser, and I don't have any issues. Also, I get fro free, better support of that webapps running in Wayland

Browsers should have a good way of running a kiosked-ish tab in a native-like way then.

I don't want to switch to my browser for Slack and then dig through tabs to find it, I want just to switch to Slack.

Just pin the tab to keep it at a fixed place. I pin Gmail and Slack as these are frequently accessed by me.

I would still have to switch back to it from whatever other tab I was looking at. I don't want to do that.

I will continue installing a specific app just for that, even if it didn't have other benefits (which it does: no browser frame, systray icon, native notifications, ...)

> A known problem in the current kernel, sometimes the system freezes for 1-15s at a time...

How is this even remotely acceptable?

It's not; they are working on a fix.

Fair, but there's no ETA and the author is fairly upbeat in his write up, and his system is barely even usable.

How does the sound / speaker system compare to a MacBook Pro? In my experience Apple just blows every other manufacturer out of the water with sound quality.

It's not worth comparing. The Frameworks are functional but that's about it.

I was very surprised by the sound coming out of my mother's new iMac.

Recently changed from a 2012 imac to a m1 air and was similarly blown away by the improvement.

According to Notebookcheck, the latest speakers that Framework uses are actually pretty decent, about 85th percentile (MBP16 is 100th percentiled): https://www.notebookcheck.net/Framework-Laptop-13-5-Ryzen-7-...

Fractional scaling works fine for me on Fedora 39. I've had some similar issues as others with amd stability, specifically with fwupd services, glitchy video playback, lots of amdgpu errors in the logs, etc...

You can dim the fingerprint reader from the BIOS settings to what I consider acceptable levels, though I hate that blue is the LED color of choice for so many things. I buy stickers to dim them in the office and bedroom.

I didn't have problems with the foam that the author did. I did have some initial boot issues where nothing happened for a few attempts. They quickly went away for whatever reason on their own.

I can't speak to battery life, my use-case keeps the laptop on power most of the time, so I set the charge percentage to 60% in the BIOS per it's recommendation to save long-term battery health.

It's too early to feel like it's a 100% solid, but it's good enough for me to use as the daily driver. I knew what I was getting into when I ordered it. I know it'll get much better within a short time. No intentions of looking back for me. I am very happy with my purchase.

The idea is nice, but I guess not until the scale is up and production cost come down a bit that the Framework laptop will become more appeal to me. By the time I want to upgrade my laptop, the hardware (CPU/RAM/GPU) would be updated so much that buying a new laptop will be cheaper and more powerful. There is no reason to swap parts.

The point of this laptop is that you can upgrade the cpu/gpu. But I would wait a couple of generations for this.

I am a gen 1 batch 2 supporter and I stopped using mine after a year when the M2 Air came out. Mine is unusable since it throttles to 200Mhz under load and is difficult for it to recover. That load being normal software development or any game. It now sits running BOINC tasks at 80% CPU because it will throttle if I set it to 100% CPU.

Apple Silicon Macbooks took laptops a decade to the future, but PCs keep acting like nothing happened.

I hope to get a good Linux laptop again some day since the OS and UX are so much better there, but that day isn't here yet.

I'm in batch 7 of this laptop's shipment waves which I expect to actually release mid to late December and it seems like that's a good thing. Still very much looking forward to it, but being super early in the AMD 7040 series releases adds to some stability situations. Overall, I'm not worried about kernel support and compatibility over the next few months, especially as the AMD 7040s release with other manufacturers as well.

And the conclusion is just about most GNU/Linux related devices for the last 25 years, with exception of the netbooks golden age with their OEM specific distros.

I am pretty surprised how complicated it was to get Limux running.

I expected I could circumvent the trouble by ordering the laptop with Ubuntu preinstalled and properly configured and tuned so I could just boot the machine and get to work.

Going through the configurator on the website I can't find an option for getting Ubuntu pre-installed.

Is this not an option then, or did I miss it?

Framework's idea looks like a great model for corporate devices. Instead of replacing the whole laptop every X years, they can just incrementally reolace broken/outdated parts. I wish my company adopts this.

The paragraph about keyboard cleaning is interesting. If keyboards are easy to swap/replace, I wonder how long until we see reports about how well (or not!) the framework keyboards hold up in a dishwasher?

> Super bright fingerprint light

The workaround I use for this (on other equipment) is a few layers of black electrical tape. If it can't be fixed in software, don't just give up. :)

If you only can buy this or a M2 MBP, which one would you get?

There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind which laptop is better value for money. People that buy framework laptops buy it out of principle.

Repairability, upgradability, openness, Linux support. Etc

Do repairability, upgradability, configurability have zero value?

For the typical laptop? I’m going to replace my Mac before I need non-warranty service. I’d say the typical user is in the same boat

I feel like they either have zero or infinite value. On pure "which laptop would I pick to do a task" it's almost never going to be a Framework. It's objectively a worse laptop for almost all daily tasks.

The issue is that repairability and upgradability are, unless you regularly break your computer, at most a once a year occurrence. On that day, you have a better laptop with the Framework (maybe). The other 364, you're dealing with new and novel frustrations you haven't had to deal with for over a decade in computing. Is your value system such that, being able to potentially manually replace a broken part is worth dealing with a bad computer the rest of the time?

Just today, I spent 30 minutes just trying to work out how to get my system clock to sync with my hardware clock, and how to get both of them to be accurate, because the Framework's battery management is so abysmal that I have to keep it shut down at all times it's not in active use/charging, and even fully shut down, it'll still so deeply discharge the battery after a week that the bios loses power and unsyncs the hardware clock. It's quite possibly the worst computer I've used in 20 years.

> ..the Framework's battery management is so abysmal that I have to keep it shut down at all times it's not in active use/charging, and even fully shut down, it'll still so deeply discharge the battery after a week that the bios loses power and unsyncs the hardware clock.

I'm not sure, but this sounds like it might be the design flaw that was in the first generation where the RTC battery did not charge via the main battery but from the plugin charger. Louis Rossman mentioned this in a recent video[0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/6Sw06swtgY0?t=584&si=ia34VzC9N50HdOOL

That seems about right. I'm about to just try to sell this laptop. It's the most I've ever spent on what's probably the worst computing device I've ever had. I could spend most of $1200 replacing all the flawed parts and underperforming parts, but at that point, I'll just buy a computer that works instead.

Eh, with value for money when getting a usable config for a macbook pro with 32gigs of ram and at least a terabyte or 2 of storage, you're looking at prices that are well above the framework to the tune of 1000€ to 1500€ more, especially if you bring your own memory and storage.

This (or in my case the intel one) I find developing on Linux for Linux is better than developing on Mac for Linux (and yes I know you can install Linux on a Mac but the new M2 Linux stuff is all a bit too new for me)! Now if I was am iOS/Mac dev then a Mac. It's the good ol' right tool for the job.

That's really simple: I refuse to buy a laptop which has non-removable storage.

> If you only can buy this or a M2 MBP, which one would you get?

The M2 MBP, because it's available in my country (Brazil).

I could probably find a way to import a Framework, but besides being a lot of work, and the import duties being no joke (AFAIK, to a first approximation, they would double the price), there's also the pain if something on it breaks and has to be repaired under warranty (IIRC, the rules for temporary export for repair without having to pay extra export and import duties are quite complicated). And to top it off, since it's a laptop, there's the extra annoyance of it not having the ABNT2 keyboard layout. And that's all if it doesn't get sent back by customs for being a radio product (due to the WiFi and Bluetooth) without the appropriate certification.

The Framework laptop and the Steam Deck are the top two in my list of electronic products which I'd want to buy if the manufacturer sold them in my country, but I'm not getting my hopes up. For now, I'm making do with a Dell.

If you want to run an LLM locally then an M2, otherwise this.

M2 because my days of enjoying tinkering with the OS are over. I enjoy higher level activities on my computer to be honest. Programming, gaming, checking email without working about 1-15 second random hangs :)

I'm not sure they appeal to the same group of users. macOS is IMNHO much worse than GNU/Linux with a proper window manager, much less comfortable to use with multiple desktops, and forces the use of a mouse/trackpad way too much.[1]

The m2 can run Linux - but external display support is probably a long way off.

So for the user wanting to run Linux - m2 isn't really viable - unless you actually work on it with just the built-in screen - for me that doesn't work ergonomically.

I have the m2 - it's not terrible - I suspect I'd prefer one of these.

[1] Rectangle and AutoRaise helps a lot, making the UX livable:

https://github.com/sbmpost/AutoRaise

https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

Is there enough margin in a laptop so that these don't end up like Fairphone, with many new generations instead of partial upgrades over the years?

Honestly the biggest issue with Linux desktop right now is that Xorg is still more compatible and widely used. I tried Wayland on multiple machines and always had trouble when using it on my Laptop with no way to switch between integrated and dedicated Graphics cards(on X i always used optimus-manager which works fine 99% of the time).

I can't wait to finally switch to Wayland when those issues are fixed.

A litany of problems, but the owner likes it anyway. Gadget therapy for the post-modern human.

What tech do you use?

The section on fractional scaling issues wouldn't exist if Framework offered a Linux compatible non HiDPI display.

It's a shame for Linux users that they decided to pick a display type that has had known issues for like a decade.

But it is 2023. Things like GTK on Wayland should support fractional scaling. In fact it is already supported by Wayland and is in GTK project's pipeline, but open source software obviously have limited resources. So I think it is fair that people would complain this does not work, but I also understand why it does not.

Framework delivering a HiDPI display makes it more future proof. HiDPI displays aren't just a gimmick. HiDPI displays is super helpful when you are short sighted for example as the increased font clarity from a HiDPI display will help you read small text better.

The HiDPI display on MacOS and the excellent support for fractional scaling is one of my favourite features of a MacBook and why I wouldn't consider purchasing a "Linux laptop" (e.g. Lenovo or whatever else) before they support this.

Different people, different priorities I guess.

I couldn’t finish the blog post. It came off as too much of a rant and a bit whiney. Linux != macOS or Windows. Gestures, and all this fancy stuff about fingerprint readers etc do not apply. I guess I’m lucky my thinkpad’s fingerprint reader works.

Anyway I’m looking forward to evaluating this laptop vs a similar AMD thinkpad as I’m in the market. I run i3 and will move to sway when I fully transition things to Wayland. Multitouch trackpads and the mouse in general is something I avoid as much as possible.

Also re the blog: the full screen modal to sign up to the mailing list before the article was presented is highly hostile to readers and screams desperation. If I like a blog I will read a few posts and then either bookmark it or add it to my rss reader if it has one. I won’t be returning to this blog though.

He had a lot of issues besides just the mouse. I think the article was fine, and probably will other people planning on getting the same laptop. There is no way that framework didn't encounter these same problems in their own install. Seems like they could have an Appendix site available for some of the fixes if they couldn't get them due to trying to get the laptop out to customers as soon as possible.

Yeah I’ve been meaning to update and fix my original post: low blood sugar, being grumpy makes for a shit take.

I don’t fault the author for having issues with the laptop. Framework, like you said, could have done a better job with the Linux support or at least had a page about workarounds or what works and what doesn’t.

And while I don’t like overt mailing list or donation requests who am I to fault anyone for wanting patrons or visitors to support or donate to the effort.

So to the blog author my apologies.

Sorry about the modal.. I think I turned that off. Still getting used to substack

My take was needlessly hard sorry about that. I wish you and your blog all the success. But thank you for not making it modal.

This all sounds exactly like what I imagined owning a Framework running Linux would be like.

I’m sure y’all are having a ball editing all of your configs and doing firmware updates in Windows, but I’ll stick to my non-repairable MacBook and keep Linux on my servers.

Running Linux on any bleeding edge device is like this. People find issues, fix issues, and then at some point, if the hardware is popular enough, it becomes plug and play.

The Intel Frameworks on Linux have been plug and play for about six months, especially on Fedora 38. Any laptop, and most hardware, is like this.

The mess here has been pretty AMD-specific.

I’ve been running linux (Fedora) on my intel Framework laptop for a little over a year. I’ve had no issues.

Yea, I've had no issues with the Linux of it really, the hardware is just... bad. It feels cheap, the battery is terrible, having it near any magnet messes up its sensors for if the lid is closed and causes random issues, and the screen is so glossy you essentially can't use it in natural lighting.

I guess I could potentially spend the cost of a third Macbook Air on replacing parts to maybe fix all of that and generate as much carbon and e-waste in the process as the sum total of the last decade of my Apple laptops, but that seems like a pyrrhic victory.

Which Intel Gen? On my 12th gen the brightness keys didn't even work out of the box on Fedora (IIRC they've been working on the fix since 2022). There's also random freezes that you can only fix by tweaking some SSD boot param (but only some SSDs are impacted)

11th gen, I think?

I did have a period of random freezes, but mine was RAM related (I had bought some RAM from Newegg, which I think was bad; I returned it and haven’t had any problems since I swapped it out).

You people are insufferable. Why even post this garbage?

You’re a PHP developer, I’m sure this stuff must seem very difficult to you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com