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Comment by chintan | Hacker News Reader

I ran XPS Developer Edition (Ubuntu) for 5+ years without any issues.

Using Framework for past year - every day I have to reboot because it freezes with 20+ Firefox tabs (Ubuntu 22.04, AMD). Tried all options (disable vGPU etc) but no luck.

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That's frustrating, I'm sorry! I don't experience anything like that, and I have over a thousand tabs open in Firefox on NixOS.

Based on https://frame.work/linux Ubuntu 24.04 is the minimum supported version for the older AMD F13's, so I'd suggest updating and then reaching out to Framework if the problem persists on a supported distro.

Yep, my last laptop purchase was an xps13. Unfortunately the 8gb of soldered on ram is becoming woefully insufficient with how bloated the modern web has gotten.

I have a beefy desktop, but if I replace my laptop I think it will probably be a thinkpad.

on chrome based browsers with Linux I have to disable 'use graphic acceleration when available' in the browser settings or the browser with freeze intermittently. This has been a consistent issue across distros for years. Not sure if it also affects firefox.

Disabling this feature mostly works, but results in poor performance for some graphics heavy websites.

I also had a lot of issues with my AMD framework laptop and ended up reverting back to a older Intel Framework laptop. Top issues with the AMD laptop were the realtek wireless, and random AMD (integrated) GPU glitches. Intel hardware continues to be absolutely top tier for Linux support.

> on chrome based browsers with Linux I have to disable 'use graphic acceleration when available' in the browser settings or the browser with freeze intermittently. This has been a consistent issue across distros for years. Not sure if it also affects firefox.

Oddly enough works fine on all Chromebooks. It really is a matter of platform hardware/firmware qualification being suited to task.

I've never had any issues on my AMD framework 13 with way more tabs than that (on Void Linux).

Older laptops, especially all-Intel ones, tend to be way more reliable on Linux from my experience.

Sounds like you might have received some bad RAM. Have you tried replacing it?

People make fun of Chrome being a RAM hog but I'm having more issues with FF than I ever did with Chrome. For some reason on reddit specifically FF will randomly freeze for a few seconds, my cursor will stop rendering on top of it (like it's going behind the window) and it won't accept inputs. If I keep typing through it it all appears in the window after it unfreezes. Also FF will regularly take multiple gigs for random tabs like Youtube if I leave them open.

Tldr it might be more of a firefox problem than a framework problem.

I have a ThinkPad T480s with Ubuntu and Firefox. Works like a dream except every now and again the whole thing locks up (have to power cycle). Happens with AWS Console and LinkedIn. Maybe it's doing me a favour.

I would hazard a guess that it’s more of a “devs only test against Chromium” problem than it is a Firefox problem. It’s a problem seen under WebKit-based browsers at times, too. Gecko and WebKit often behave differently and have different performance characteristics than Chromium/Blink does, but that’s often not accounted for at all. The extent of QA on non-Chromium browsers too often stops at “it technically runs”.

That's also probably part of the story but ultimately as an end user the fact is Firefox is a bad experience I'm suffering through only to not use Chrome. I can't force websites to patch whatever memory leak is causing Youtube tabs on FF to eat 5 GB of ram for example.

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