Disclosure: I bought one because of the idea and dream. It’s…okay-ish. I love the idea, but the execution is going to be a time-based thing. They need to fix a lot of issues with power consumption, and I get this will take time, but I just don’t understand where their projections for performance and battery life came from on Linux. They have entire papers written on the subject, and a lot of documentation on specific kernel issues and distros, but this is like a Beta. I’m afraid for the 16" AMD version I’m also expecting soon, but got delayed. I REALLY want to love this project, but it’s not there yet.
I’ve had mine since they launched and haven’t had any major complaints, I’d my Linux experience so far has been about same as on previous laptops. Though I will say that it does get fairly toasty.
I have the same feelings. I was in the market for a laptop after a long time of desktop use only. I went for it because I love the idea of owning my hardware without any corporate bullshit. But the whole laptop feels very beta, which can be OK, but the price is also quite high.
Pros:
formfactor, I love the screen
switches for camera and mic
open source & Linux
Firmware Updates are a breeze
easy access to hardware
you can use your own ram and disk
Magnets, everywhere
Cons:
They promised shipment early Q3 for batch 1, I got it early Q4
opening the laptop is quite hard, the groove is to small/finicky
I hate the expansion cards. They are too hard to pop out, you need so much power to get them out.
only four ports, that’s if you don’t count your power supply. Very weak
clicking with the TouchPad is very mid, borderline bad
restarting causes my power supply to stop working, I need to unplug and insert it again. And I mean I need to unplug the power supply, not the laptop.
graphics problems, constant noise artifacts
default sound is very bad, search for equalizer Configs, it makes the speakers bearable
black screens where I need to close the lid, wait for sleep and open again for me to be able to work again
Fingerprint reader does not work
General Linux Problems, Kubuntu has a few issues, other distros might have a better experience
no worldwide shipping. I’m waiting for my visa for Japan and won’t be able to get any shipping of replacement parts over there.
On a sidenote, I probably broke my screen a few days ago while trying the fix/debug the graphics/noise problems. I don’t know how I fucked up, but 5cm of the screen is permanently black now… On a positive note, replacing it supposedly is quite easy. I hope they ship it fast.
Some of those Cons sound pretty bad, especially the graphics problems. A lot of those I figure I could live with, but some, like the constant noise on the graphics or a low-quality touchpad would be just too much to tolerate.
I am currently awaiting my (pretty damn expensive) Framework 16 at this time, and I can only hope my experience will be a bit better than yours…
I don’t know if those are Amd, framework or Linux issues and who is to blame. The cpu is very new so there might be more driver issues than normal. Hopefully these issues get resolved with future updates. The first firmware update didn’t help my issues.
Most of the time the noise is negligible, but with dark screens and resource intensive tasks it gets more noticeable and pronounced. But it’s better than the screen tearing other users experience.
I’m wishing you luck that most of the issues are resolved when they ship the framework 16. I’m very tempted to get that one as well, just for a custom ortho keyboard if they ever make one…
Not all of that is true, you who seems to be from Framework. Did you fix the ACPI issues? How about the SLEEP modes? Anything being done about the crazy battery drain on AMD chips?
Those are my personal experiences, they might not be representative for all users, but those are my issues. I don’t work for framework amd can’t give you updates regarding support issues.
I’ve been daily driving a first gen 13"/i7 model for 2 years now. It’s not the best laptop I’ve ever owned, but it’s my favorite.
Battery dies in sleep, sometimes it won’t wake up… honestly things I can live with. In exchange, I’ve been able to increase ram, replace the screen, and upgrade the back panel myself. I’ve also switched up my port configuration twice over the 2 years and that’s been super convenient.
It’s like running a less mainstream desktop environment: It’s got rough edges, but I picked it for reasons besides stability and consistency.
I’m going to grab an AMD mainboard next year instead of buying a new laptop, and will turn the old mobo into a server for my website.
Idk, it’s got issues, but no more than any other laptop I’ve run Linux on. It’s good enough and I smile every time I pull it out of my bag and see the gear logo (even when it turns out it died in my bag lol)
I actually think 2024 has a very good chance of being the year of wayland, scene graph api just got finished wlroots side, wine is rapidly approaching ready for wayland, sway-side all that’s missing is global shortcuts and single window capture (and disabling vsync for games is about to be merged, if you care about that).
It’s all rapidly shaping up, they even fixed nightlight nvidia side. I think it all depends on nvidia fixing shit.
With GNOME and KDE going Wayland only, it is all but over for X. Qt, GTK, and Electron already work on Wayland so most apps are ready. Cinnamon, XFCE, Enlightenment, and MATE all have Wayland plans now. There are a few compositor libraries that other window managers and desktop environments can leverage.
NVIDIA is slowly getting their act together. Many of the legitimate complainants are being addressed. There are desirable features starting to appear that are Wayland only. Even non-Linux systems are adding Wayland support.
It is hard to believe after so many years but I think that, by Christmas 2024, most Linux users will have stopped using X and maybe even stopped talking about it.
It has a structured yaml with a test command for potentially destructive config changes over ssh. Other than that: none. It was a real pain upgrading some servers, as always with Ubuntu.
It literally has no benefits, and is only a pain to use.
Actually, it does have one benefit: it integrates with Canonical’s other tech. For example, MAAS uses ot for networking, and I bet lxc uses it somehow.
What is even the value of Netplan on… desktop? Most people just pick their WiFi in the menu in Gnome. That sounds like a lot of unnecessary complexity.
For servers, sure, it’s fairly nice. But, desktop? Why?
For Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical plans to polish the Netplan codebase and deliver a Netplan 1.0 release with API/ABI stability. They are also hoping other Linux distributions begin adopting Netplan. Debian so far has decided to go with Netplan for their nework stack on Debian Cloud images.
That’s probably the reason for pushing it to desktop builds.
If you’re just using DHCP, you won’t. What Netplan does is take a YAML input file and renders it as a systemd-networkd or NetworkManager configuration file. It’s a very quick and easy way to configure your network, and even have a try command that auto reverts in case you get kicked out of your SSH session.
It seems like what they’re doing for the desktop is hacking up NetworkManager so that it saves back its config as Netplan configs instead of regular NetworkManager configs. That’s the part I’m confused about, because NetworkManager is huge and Netplan doesn’t support close to every option. Their featuresets are wildly different. And last time I checked, the NetworkManager renderer was the least polished one, with the systemd-networkd one being close to a 1:1 match and more reliable.
It made a lot more sense when it was one way only. Two way sounds like an absolute mess.
Netplan makes more sense for the desktop then it does for a server because yaml is UI friendly. For the server it just adds an unnecessary level of complexity.
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