My last machine was a Thinkpad, and I never got it to work nearly as well. Standby mostly didn't work and when docking it, external screens would be arranged incorrectly unless I rebooted. USB ports also did not activate when docked, so I had a script for resetting the USB devices. Sometimes a new kernel version would come along and cause it to start freezing.
I did check out other laptops before buying the tuxedo (t14s g6 amd, zenbook s14), but according to the information available at the time, those machines had lots of issues. They were also more expensive.
Therefore I'm very curious about which laptop that you think is both better and cheaper than tuxedo, and has full hardware support out of the box?
Lenovo pros:
- better case
- better keyboard
Tuxedo pros:
- significantly cheaper price
- two fan setup enables faster performace (it is stable with 90W power consumption)
- almost twice as long battery life (tuxedo has bigger batery with similar weight and size)
- two nvme slots
If you want more powerful notebook with slightly worse build quality, tuxedo is good choice.
Anyway I would go with FRAMEWORK there. Sadly they did not deliver to my address when I was in the market, but now they do.
Hopefully latest Tuxedo does have better hardware support? Mine has problems with charging, usb-c charging is even worse (slow charge normal performance or ok charge and 5W throttling which makes all cores go at 1GHz), battery saving feature that hides 10% of battery capacity in firmware etc. They also stopped delivering any firmware updates after a few months.
I've got an MSI laptop and I've settled on simply never using the Nvidia card (prime-select iGPU only). The integrated graphics have access to 16gb of ram (versus the Nvidia card's 4gb) and deliver better performance without the whole laptop hitting 100 degrees.
I hope the Asahi Linux project succeeds so I can buy the fabled Apple silicon laptops just to run Linux on them.
I just double checked the firmware setup and it seems I was misremembering things. There's a toggle between "DISCRETE" and "MSHybrid" which means dGPU only and hybrid iGPU + dGPU graphics. I use it in MSHybrid mode with nouveau drivers. This keeps the dGPU in the lowest possible power mode.
It still wastes around 7-15 W doing pretty much nothing according to my monitoring script. That's the entire power budget of a single board computer like the Latte Panda Mu.
Which means they can't be upstreamed because GPLv3 is not compatible with GPLv2 (for the same reason CDDLv1.0 is considered incompatible).
They either need to track every copyright from the contractors (who AFAIK didn't sign over licensing to Tuxedo) to relicense the code, or write drivers again from scratch.