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Comment by zbrozek | Hacker News Reader

My AMD Framework 13 occasionally hangs and requires hard reset to come back to life. No errors are generated. As far as I can tell it instantly and unpredictably stops executing any instructions at all.

There hasn't been a driver or firmware update in three months.

The keyboard and trackpad are mediocre.

The fan vents are on the bottom of the computer where they're almost permanently blocked.

It's not a terrible computer, and it does have what was most important to me when I was buying (a matte 3:2 screen). But I can't recommend it to anybody.

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On the bottom is the air in-take. The air is blown at the edge of the bottom between the hinges.

I have the fw13 12th gen and I don't think the keyboard and trackpad are mediocre at all.

I am running the Fedora Cinnamon spin. The issue for me is that only sometimes it takes a minutes to get out of sleep after I close the lid. Apart from that it works fine, and I would recommend it.

Deepest apologies; I meant to say grille. Regardless of the flow direction, I am constantly blocking the aperture with my legs or blanket.

The touchpad frequently misidentifies movement as taps, something that hasn't been a problem for me on the Macbook Pro, the X1 Carbon, or the Microsoft Surface. The keyboard keys aren't too bad, but could have a sharper inflection point in the force vs travel and also be little bit less wobbly. Neither of these are fatal flaws, but are enough, I think, to call them mediocre.

Do you also find that the computer forgets its DDR5 training pretty regularly and takes a long time to boot? For me I think it's ~1-in-10 boots.

I had a hang that sounds similar to yours the other day, and it appeared to retrain on the next boot. Does that line up with what you've seen?

It seems to retrain more often after a hang, but not every time.

I don't think it has ever been a good idea to rest a laptop on a blanket on even laps for more than a few minutes... Anyways, that's been a concern on all my previous laptops. I bought a second laptop platform-cushion for my legs/bedtime and it's much better no matter the laptop.

Same for touchpad issues, my big palms sides have always been the source of misidentified clicks. The way I solved it on linux was by making it narrower in software. It take a one line straightforward command to do so.

I really like the keyboard I must say. It's much better than my previous laptops (that were admittedly cheaper)

I don't have any boot issues on my model so I don't know about a boot problem sorry

I'm good about keeping my wrists straight; it's not a palm problem. I very frequently want to tap and then move, but end up erroneously dragging.

Regarding the blanket; it's cool indoors here and so blankets are a fact of life. My other laptops have no issue with this because grilles aren't on the bottom. They usually draw or exhaust from the hinge and do the opposite from the sides. Also it's called a laptop, being on a lap is an expected use-case.

I have that one and no crashes at all. If I had to guess you might have some bad RAM causing it. Try running a memtest like program to see if it finds anything.

Latest Fedora 39 kernel fixed a problem I had switching from graphics to a virtual terminal and back.

I've done that and have had zero errors after running as many loops as completed overnight (if memory serves, just under ten full loops of memtest86+). But I agree with the intuition; I was also suspicious of memory.

I see. Graphics drivers were my second idea. They will mature.

Another poster on here a while ago said that it took up to two years for a brand new AMD chipset to get fully supported on Linux. I remember that happening even to an old Intel Dell I had with docking station.

(Looks like this kernel param is meant to solve my problem: amdgpu.sg_display=0 rather than the updated kernel.)

Anyway if you can't get it stable, I'd call support to replace your motherboard perhaps. Shouldn't have to suffer with crashes.

Have you installed the firmware updates to the AMD board? I had similar issues but the latest set of firmware updates seems to have fixed them.

There haven't been any releases in the time that I've had the computer, and the board shipped with still-latest.

I agree, the input devices leave something to be desired. I dream of grafting a MBP keyboard and trackpad onto my FW13.

As far as I can tell, and I’m happy to be corrected, most of the Apple trackpad “magic” comes from the software drivers, not from unique hardware. So making a frankenwork laptop wouldn’t really help unless you spent effort fighting with closed source blobs in an environment they don’t want to be in.

Are you running Windows or another OS?

Windows 11 and Fedora

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