Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040 Series Makes for a Great Linux Laptop

> AMD support on Linux is the biggest issue.

From my experience, it takes about a year between the time AMD hardware is generally available to the public and the time Linux support for it is rock solid.

I got one of the first 6800U laptops available and at the beginning it was rough, crashing often for no reasons. Slowly, each new kernel or firmware version fixed more and more things until one day, about a year later, all issues were gone.

Don't feel too bad; I too am on the latest AMD 7040 hotness via a ThinkPad and the BIOS here is garbage too as it relates to Linux.

Wifi antenna. Damn. Align the connector with the socket. Push it forward/up then press down into the socket. I did a replacement once and I was about to break it until I saw a few videos and a text description of it.

Just did my own swap yesterday: I was lazy (practical?) and just kept the Intel wifi chip I had already so I wouldn't have to redo the antenna connections.

I'm on Ubuntu 23.10 and I think just the pretty new kernel, plus my Framework board being a later build with the newer firmware, meant I dodged any graphics issues (at least any I'd have immediately noticed).

> The weird power supply limitations for using the board standalone, requiring at least a 100W supply for still less than full performance unless any battery is attached, also limits the flexibility that makes these boards attractive outside of the laptop case, whether bought for that intent or as a post-upgrade reuse.

That's because Framework doesn't want to risk getting liable for damaged power supplies. With a battery, the power management circuitry can make sure that, bar an outright shortcut, the load on the PSU will not ever be more than the allowed power. Without it, there is no buffer.

I've also experienced the GPU issues and sleep issues, but for me, these were solved by updating to bios v3.03

I currently have a 12th Gen Intel Framework. How much of an improvement in everyday use do you see?

I am very surprised to hear reports of poor Linux support for AMD devices. I recently purchased a GPD Win Max 2 [1] and a GPD Win 4 [2] for work. Both devices are AMD 7840U with Radeon 780M (and 64 GiB RAM at 6400 MT/s since I saw what appeared to be instability at 7500 MT/s.)

I installed Archlinux on both and the support has been very solid with the `linux-lts` kernel and only one kernel flag (`amd_pstate=guided`.)

The following work: touchscreen; suspend (s2idle, which correctly enters S0ix state giving ≥100h battery life suspended but requiring I disable entries in `/proc/acpi/wakeup`); audio; media keys; game controls; wifi; Bluetooth; USB; SecureBoot (with `systemd-boot`); webcam (available only on Win Max 2.) The TPM2 works, but I haven't done anything with it yet (and it's an fTPM.)

Battery life is quite good (8~10h with the `acpi-cpufreq` `powersave` governor.) If I dial down the TDP, I can eke out even more battery life than that. If I dial it up to performance, I get 1~2h of battery life (and the exhaust from the fan port runs very hot.) I plan to try the `amd_pstate` governor (kernel flag `amd_pstate=active`) once support is available in the LTS kernel, though I like being able to control TDP via the CLI with AUR packages like `ryzenadj-git`. (This sounds like a lot of work, but I have a short shell script where I dialed in the right `cpupower` and `ryzenadj-git` commands optimal for my use.)

Hibernate works perfectly on the Win 4; I haven't tested it on the Win Max 2 (since s2idle works so well!)

On the Win 4, I can't get `xrandr` modes at anything other than native resolution (1920×1080) to work, but I am content with scaling via `xrandr --scale-from`. All resolutions display properly on the Win Max 2. Rotation works perfectly on both devices, but I rotate manually (and I haven't bothered to see if there is a gyroscope sensor.) There is minimal to no screen tearing. The displays present to the OS as landscape (i.e., rotation is not necessary from the Linux console.)

The only hardware that outright doesn't work are the fingerprint readers (but I believe Linux support for fingerprint readers is limited to very few devices.)

In short, my recent experience with AMD 7840U/Radeon 780M has been nothing short of amazing, and these devices have been an absolute pleasure to use.

[1] https://www.gpd.hk/gpdwinmax2

[2] https://gpd.hk/gpdwin4

[3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ryzenadj-git

>> The weird power supply limitations for using the board standalone, requiring at least a 100W supply for still less than full performance unless any battery is attached, also limits the flexibility

What? I've been thinking about a VISA mounted PC on the back of my TV. This board seems like a great idea, but 100W for a laptop board? Why? Are there some transients that need more than some caps can supply?

I think the bigger problem for the community is that the M3 absolutely spanks it in performance. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_7840u-...

It's not just a matter of poor drivers and not being able to wake up from sleep. You typical Mac lasts for tens of hours on battery and runs faster than Intel/AMD's flagship laptop grade processors. This is a big deal and if the x64 hardware people don't up their game soon, the Linux on desktop community will be hurt as users would move to the Apple ecosystem, despite the non-free nature. The gap has grown too big.

> I've been using XFCE for the better part of 15 years meanwhile.

Nice, nearly 20 years for me.

> (apparently they only have two full-time developers for the whole project?)

We actually have zero full time developers. I'm probably the closest thing to a full-time developer as I have a lot of free time on my hands these days, but even then I don't work on Xfce enough to call it full time. And we only have two people working on Wayland support, and so that's even less than the non-full-time each of us put in.

> Its Wayland support is a permanent unfortunate "work-in-progress"

We've probably made more progress in the past 6 months than all the time prior, combined. Things are coming along, but it'll probably be another 1-2 years before it's usable, and only "stable" in time for the 4.22.0 release at the end of 2026. And that's still all aspirational; it may not materialize in that time.

It turns out that the Wayland protocol is super limited, and a lot of things that you could do easily on X11 you essentially have to re-invent from scratch. And that's before we even talk about turning xfwm4 into a Wayland compositor. (Some rando has forked xfwm4 and is building a Wayland compositor with it, but has chosen not to collaborate with us at all, so it's unclear if their work will ever be mergeable.)

But that's what happens when you're a developer for a software project that has no corporate sponsorship or people hired specifically to work on it. Feel free to contribute; we could definitely use the help!

Anyhow: I run Xfce on a Framework 13, and it's fine. I've set UI scaling to 2x, and I've added a custom modeline to X11 for 2712x1805 (1.2x native). Big downside is apparently this turns off the iGPU's ability to eliminate tearing. I suspect there's a way to fix that, but I haven't had the motivation to dig into it (I wonder if simply using a more-even scaling factor like 1.25 would do it, even if things would appear a little smaller than I'd like).

I've been using X11 on my Framework laptop for years. No desktop environment at all. Just my regular old school window manager[1]. No KDE or GNOME. But also no XFCE.

The only thing I had to do to get scaling working for me was set two environment variables[2].

I was indeed worried about this when I bought the laptop. Prior to this, I avoided anything with resolutions higher than 1920x1200. But it turned out that everything mostly worked with a couple tweaks.

I think the only real issue I've run into is `git gui`. As I understand it, the GUI toolkit it uses doesn't support scaling? Not sure. I ended up working around it by just increasing font sizes. I suppose this exposes the weakness that is probably impacting you: the scaling on my laptop is being done by the GUI toolkits, not the display server or compositor. (I don't always run a compositor, but when I do, I use `picom`. Mostly just to avoid tearing.)

[1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/wingo

[2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/ea3a88e6160f4244...

The solution I've been pretty happy with instead of Wayland fractional scaling is to have scaling set at 1:1 and use GDK_DPI_SCALE (I think that's the one) at 1.5 or 1.25 or whatever. Things like Firefox, Chrome, the standard GTK system apps will scale nicely, and stuff that doesn't support it will just be small instead of doing a blurry zoom.

For better or worse, I think Wayland is here to stay and that's where all the development is going.

Agreed. I struggled a bit with XFCE on my Framework for a few months before switching to GNOME, largely because Framework's display size is best with fractional scaling. 100% made everything too small, and I could work with 200% and some tweaks (although some applications didn't play nicely at all), but 175% or 150% is perfect. Their choice of display size is one reason (among several) why Framework is really not Linux-first.

I admittedly just got my Framework a couple of days ago, but I found scaling the text size to be sufficient in quite a lot of cases, at least for me, in XFCE.

If you'd like SecureBoot back, lanzaboote [0] has worked well for me and no longer requires unstable!

[0] https://github.com/nix-community/lanzaboote

Yeah, some of the wifi drivers aren't available in the stock W11 image.

The ax210 does work in the ryzen motherboard but just ok. I had persistent errors relating to the card in dmesg and occasional disconnects.

The wifi that ships with the ryzen framework is made by MediaTek, not Realtek, and it's been working smoothly since I installed it.

They're shipping Realtek? I thought they were shipping Mediatek? Big difference in my experience.

I really prefer the half-height "T" layout in those size constraints but some people really hate it. It's an oddity to me: as you say, I'd be happier being able to easily feel out the layout and having all directions be the same size targets. Other than just not having the "look" of empty space I don't feel that there's really anything to recommend the "full height left/right, half-height up/down" layout.

I wonder if you'll have more ability to play around in that space with the 16, as its top case is more modular. Part of the problem with the Framework 13 input cover is that the cover including the key gaps is all one piece of aluminum, so things have to work within those sized holes, or else involve a completely different input cover.

(Edit: the 16 does I think have more theoretical room for alternate keyboard layouts, but of course that's assuming anyone makes them. More importantly, it just has the inverted T layout on the regular keyboard already.)

Simple answer my friend, so that they can use one chassis on both the ANSI and ISO models. Pretty standard practice in laptops.

The 'black strip' between enter and backslash is actually just a recessed part of the enter key. It's not a separate plastic piece.

Source: typing this on my Framework 13 AMD right now :)

What's your typical battery life like? The only thing keeping me on my M1 MacBook is only having to charge it ~2x per week.

Do the brightness keys on the keyboard work? What's the battery drain like when the laptop is asleep?

Does the pressure to click on the trackpad feel 'even' across the entire trackpad? For example, does clicking at the top feel the same as the bottom? That's something I never got used to on my ThinkPad, clicking on the top is basically impossible.

How does the trackpad compare to a MacBook trackpad?

How's the keyboard? Have you maybe used Thinkpads to compare?

Is the fingerprint sensor working? How reliable/fast is it?

Which linux distro did you install and have you had any issues?

Fellow batch 8er! I got the 8-core AMD option, super excited. My 2016 Razer finally shat the bed after I attempted to clean the keyboard...now it "turns on" but the fans don't spin and the BIOS never loads. I read it might be the fuses on the motherboard, but I tested them all and continuity is fine. I was originally a bit hesitant to go from a GPU-enabled laptop back to integrated, but realized that almost all the games I played on my laptop didn't need a GPU anyway. My Razer battery would blow up every once in a while and I suspected it had to do with the excessive heat of gaming, so I stopped pushing it.

In the meantime I got my desktop set up again (was stuck on Windows 7, now on linux) and got some horrible Asus laptop for when I'm not at my desk.

The only thing I'm worried about is all of my current setup is on X and it seems for any real display scaling that Wayland is the way to go, so I'm not excited about switching everything over (I'm on i3 and probably a few other tools/scripts that rely solely on X). I guess we'll see how it works out.

I hope you'll write about your experience with the Framework when it arrives. I am still content with my T460s, but it won't last forever.

> current T460s has really started feeling slow in the last year

Been there; web sites are rather heavy nowadays and two cores, combined with everything else running on the system, just can't keep up anymore.

Phoronix already did an article comparing the M2 running Asahi with Zen 4 machines.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m2-zen4-mobile

It already comes with a certified UNIX.

My native keyboard layout is Icelandic so I'm not holding my breath. I ordered one with a blank ISO layout.

You could order the (black) blank one and ordering an engraving at a repair shop? (I have slightly esoteric keyboard-layout needs and I’m thinking about it, although my last experience with engraving wasn’t the most positive.)

They do offer ISO layouts, which afaik all nordic language layouts use.

Seems fine for me