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Comment by nrp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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.

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...

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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