Comment by seabrookmx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seabrookmx | Hacker News Reader

The article is pretty light on details. Whether the Framework is worth it to you really depends on your use case. I never leave a laptop in my bag for three weeks, and if I do I have the foresight to actually shut it down rather than sleep it. So the battery drain while sleeping is less of a problem for me.

My Framework 13 has the Ryzen 5 AI 340 Chip, and I get 5-6 hours of work on a charge. The Macbooks definitely beat this, and their hardware has other benefits (silent if you opt for the Air, bigger/better trackpad, etc) but for me, being able to run Linux is worth the trade-off by far.

I like that on Linux (GNOME) I have all the functionality I need out of the box without having to install a paid app for window snapping (I heard they fixed this recently?) or to make my mouse buttons work. I also find that since I work with containers a lot, developing on Linux removes a lot of friction. I can run docker/containerd natively without having to babysit a VM that likes to eat all my RAM or hang randomly (no docker/rancher desktop layer). Even just having the same coreutils and package managers as I do inside the containers really simplifies things. Our MacOS devs are always struggling with homebrew putting shared libraries weird places that can't be found by the python bindings and this "just works" on Linux.

My Framework is a personal device, not for work. I might use it once a day or less for a couple hours or less. It was 100% charged this past Saturday night when I picked it up off the charger. I used it for an hour or two looking for doing some planning for Halloween. Nothing serious, just browsing with Firefox. I shut the lid and placed it on the coffee table. I picked it up Sunday night to find the battery had depleted to below 20% and Windows was in Power Save mode.

This happens every time. I get one and half evenings of light usage out of it before having to charge it.

You can change the action for "shutting lid" in windows settings. Mapping it to hibernate can help. You might have to enable hibernation first if you haven't already.

Windows has automatic Modern Standby to Hibernate support (by default after 5% battery drain in standby). If it is not entering Hibernate, there may be an application keeping the system awake.

This works great for me on my Lenovo, I don't even have to close the lid, it just works. I think I configured it to be a little more aggressive about going to sleep when on battery than the default, but the settings work.

What about the other 95% of the time?

this sounds like a dumb workaround for fundamental issues that should ideally be addressed by beating app, driver, and hardware developers into submission in a way that would probably fall afoul of antitrust law

5-6 hours? In 2025? That's... really bad. My 5 year old Macbook Pro lowest-spec M1 gets at least 10-12 hours of work on a charge and lasts for weeks in sleep mode.

I love my Framework but the battery life is indeed horrendous no matter how you slice it. Combine it with the sleep drain and if I use it for a bit then close it overnight without shutting it down it's probably dead by the morning.

To me it appears that the screen is a huge power hog - at least in the 16.

My idle power consumption at 0% display brightness is around 7.5W, but I've seen people get to as low as 6.5W. Not great, not terrible. With the display at 50% it jumps to the teens(13-17W).

Meanwhile the display in the MBP peaks at 6.2W:

https://andytran93.com/2021/12/05/power-consumption-implicat...

I guess herein lies their secret sauce - with the rest of the device idling at ~5W total power consumption in this state doesn't go beyond 11W.

I've seen the whole MBP (not just the display) using just 4.5 W while browsing HN with little else running.

Let's me try to give you the solutions to your problems using Mac.

1. Homebrew: I use Nix package manager (with home manager, though you don't need to) and get rid of homebrew completely.

2. Docker: I assume you referred to Desktop version. You can just just Colima and the Docker/Compose CLI. You will get rid of all the bloats coming with Desktop. Bonus: see #1 for installing Colima and Docker CLI.

The parent's complaint about non-native docker is not solved by colima. It's not bloat from the desktop app it's the fact that you have to run a VM to run any sort of container runtime on a mac.

This is no longer the case with macOS 26.

Edit: each container still gets its own vm but the container runtime is now native.

https://github.com/apple/container

"The container runtime is now native" is a meaningless phrase. The containers are VMs and they will always be VMs.

Colima constant take a lot of cpu, but issue gone after switching to orbstack which is not FOSS unfortunately.

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