7 ms·

I've been running NixOS on my Framework for the last few months, and I've been really happy with it. I initially got it so I'd have viable hardware to do osdev

I've been running NixOS on my Framework for the last few months, and I've been really happy with it. I initially got it so I'd have viable hardware to do osdev on, so learning that they are going to open-source its firmware makes me even more happy.

rnk 5y ago
Seems too good to be true. Reasonable prices, upgradable, no soldered ram. So has it been a reliable Linux laptop, what's the battery life with your options?
- dheera 5y ago
  I've been using a Framework laptop for a month on Ubuntu 21.10 and pretty happy with it. Some hiccups but mostly answered by digging through forums. Battery life in operation is excellent, but it does drain 30% in 8 hours when on suspend which is a bit much. Not a dealbreaker but hope this can be solved.
  - addcninblue 5y ago
    Out of my element here, but would be curious to see if this is something solvable in firmware (now open-sourced!) or if it's a hardware problem to begin with (power states? etc). Edit: Also curious if this issue is generally a hardware or firmware issue in most laptops, or if it's a mix of both.
    - 4cao 5y ago
      Could be caused by Modern Standby (by default newer laptops remain on even when nominally off, which has been known to cause issues). Some more details here: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/145891-how-check-if-modern-standby-supported-windows-10-a.html https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/145891-how-check-if-mode...
  - sydney6 5y ago
    I can imagine that the power draw in S3 could come from having (replacable) DDR Memory instead of (mostly soldered) LP-DDR Memory. edit: typo.
    - bestouff 5y ago
      The problem is that current Intel laptops don't use S3 anymore, they use S0ix a.k.a. "modern standby", an abomination where the CPU doesn't really sleep and the battery drains fast. Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. all have the same problem.
      - jpetso 5y ago
        S0ix has stronger requirements on the "correct" interaction between firmware/BIOS and OS, it offloads more work to the OS. Poorly implemented S0ix will drain the battery faster, but correctly implemented S0ix is as good as S3 or even better. Lenovo put out a buggy S3 implementation on some systems that hasn't been tested well because it's only an optional "Linux suspend" setting. Drains twice as fast as Linux with correctly implemented S0ix. And the worst thing is, nobody except Lenovo do can fix it because it's all on the BIOS level, and their China-based firmware team has other priorities. Well-implemented S3 is nice. But it's going to disappear. Both Intel and AMD are switching away with full force, vendors won't have S3 options in the BIOS going forward and the ones that remain will likely suck. On the other hand, S0ix support is coming together even on AMD platforms which were a little late to the party. Once it's working decently, I'd rather trust my OS than my laptop manufacturer's firmware team to suspend components correctly.
      - sydney6 5y ago
        I have a Thinkpad X1 from 2018 and by default it came with S0ix enabled and Lenovo later on added the S3 sleep state option through a BIOS update, called "Linux compatibility something".. Before that, one had to manually edit the DSD table to get rid of this evil burning-sleeping-laptop-in-backpack-feature called S0ix. Does the Framework Laptop, or other popular models from the other manfacturers you mentioned, not have a S3 sleep state option these days, i.e. S0ix only?
  - throwaway2568 5y ago
    High battery drain during standby on Linux can be due to the system not entering the proper sleep state. I had this happen to me on an AMD machine lately, in that case disabling secure boot solved the issue. Here is a pretty detailed blog post in checking if that is the problem and how to deal with it on intel systems https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-states-linux https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-states-li...
    - tata71 5y ago
      > disabling secure boot solved the issue Lovely...
      - dheera 5y ago
        Isn't secure boot just a Microsoft thing to try to stymie competition by preventing booting OSes other than Windows?
        AndroidKitKat 5y ago
        Debian seems to indicate otherwise: https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot
  - BlackLotus89 5y ago
    > cat /sys/power/mem_sleep If deep isn't selected do so and try again. You could have problems with your nvme coming out of suspend though. I got similar problems on my pinebook pro, but sadly this is all too common.
- _zooted 5y ago
  Having come from elementaryOS I can say that Fedora 35 is awesome. So much better!
  - lillecarl 5y ago
    Having come from Debian, Ubuntu, and Manjaro I settled on what feels like the last distro I will use on my own systems: NixOS. It's not so much better, it's so much different. Every(ish) single package, every single line of configuration(ish) is under version control in a(couple) nix files. I share (most) of it between my systems. With flakes (and it's lockfile) it's a 100%(ish) deterministic system. Downside: The language is arcane to me and the tooling is dogshit. Not that I could've made it any better, but running my config repo through entre to rebuild on every write to get some promiscuous error nobody has had before sucks major D. Therefore I still have an Ubuntu container (because every desktop application targets Ubuntu) running with X11 forwarding for the few packages that aren't in nixpkgs that I wanna run. I also don't use home-manager, but chezmoi for my dotfiles. Since I want my home configuration to work on MacOS and other distros I might SSH. Atomic upgrades and downgrades are such a great feature I don't know how people can live without it now that I've experienced it. Note: The default configuration NixOS gives you is also shit, out of the box they don't ship a system like you'd want to consume it (nixos-generate-config). An anecdotal example is that Avahi isn't installed by default, which means chromecasting won't work until you figure out that you need Avahi, i18n config is shit too. So it's not all green grass, but definitely worth it, since every Nix line you write is an investment into making your experience better "forever" (I don't see NixOS going away anytime soon, very healthy activity on the project). Now after praising NixOS for awhile, let's praise the developers of all packages that are compiled into the lovely distros you all use. For me the KDE team can't get enough praise, the software is so damn good.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      > I also don't use home-manager, but chezmoi for my dotfiles. Since I want my home configuration to work on MacOS and other distros I might SSH. FYI, home manager works on MacOS just fine. I usually tell people to start with Home Manager as I think it's the best gateway drug to Nix stuff at the moment.
- bo1024 5y ago
  You nailed it, battery is the only downside I’ve had, not awful but probably say 3 hours of video playback, or 5-6 hours of web use. Haven’t used it unplugged all that much so very rough guesses. Bigger problem with my fedora install at least is battery draining while the lid is closed. Overall great machine Edit: I may be missing software updates that improve this, no idea
  - reacharavindh 5y ago
    I very much wanted to hear about this and damn :-( Video playback must be hardware accelerated by now and be super efficient. Another worry was about low power sleep modes and waking up, and looks like it is not solved too. I might have to suck it up and buy the Mac for my needs after all. I have my trusty Linux desktop for all my big compute needs. I was hoping to make the mobile machine also run Linux, but the specific needs there (crisp display, nice battery life, Linux friendliness) seems to be an elusive goal.
    - DrBenCarson 5y ago
      * crisp display * nice battery life * Linux friendliness Not elusive at all, you can find an M1 MacBook Pro at any Apple, Best Buy, or Costco store.
      - Kinrany 5y ago
        M1 are not Linux-friendly at all.
        DrBenCarson 5y ago
        I can run a Linux vm emulating x64 or aarch64 right now on M1… Not to mention zsh is the login shell out of the box… It’s more flexible that WSL2 in my opinion See https://github.com/lima-vm/lima https://github.com/lima-vm/lima for a very friendly QEMU wrapper running on M1
        astrange 5y ago
        Run it in a VM. Works fine.
- sneak 5y ago
  The screen is very low-res and the GPU is weak. This is why I don't have one. If you don't care about pixels (seems common in PC-land), this is probably a good thing re: power consumption. I look at text all day, every day, and want it to be high res. It's been high res on my Macs for half a decade, and my XPS is even better. I'll get one of these once they fix the screen.
  - aquova 5y ago
    The Framework has a 200 DPI screen. It's lower than say a MacBook, but I wouldn't consider that to be "low-res", especially in the laptop space.
  - jonaustin 5y ago
    This 'low-res' comment makes no sense, I'll never go back to 1080p, but 2256x1504 is plenty IMO for text (I live in a CLI all day pretty much).
    - gorjusborg 5y ago
      Especially on a 13" screen. I have an XPS 13 with a 4k screen and I never use it at native resolution undocked because I'd need a magnifying glass to read anything on it.
      - sneak 5y ago
        You're always using it at native resolution, you're just adjusting your renderer settings. Nobody's saying your fonts should be tiny. I'm saying they should be rendered in high resolution. I have the same computer and display. I run it at 4k native but nothing is small, no magnifying glass required.
        gorjusborg 5y ago
        > You're always using it at native resolution, you're just adjusting your renderer settings. No, when I wrote 'native resolution' I meant 1:1 pixel mapping, which is pretty obvious by context. Nobody has a laptop with a CRT on it these days.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  From what I've heard battery life is much worse on Linux than Windows. If you're willing to spend some time hacking around you can close the gap a bit, but it'll still be a gap.
  - sva_ 5y ago
    Personally I can't confirm this. I've recently replaced the battery on my 2014 Thinkpad, and on low brightness I get around 8h of battery. That is of course, while not doing a lot of compute (compiling). I don't think this was much higher, back when I used Windows all those years ago, so I'm not sure what people are saying with low battery with Linux? I don't see how Windows could get me much more? And why would it?
    - Rebelgecko 5y ago
      If you have a Thinkpad, then the issues with the Framework (CPU sleep states, needing to turn of secure boot to hibernate properly, power management issues in Framework BIOS 3.06, etc) wouldn't necessarily apply to your laptop
  - james-redwood 5y ago
    I’ve found this to be variable in my personal experience based on OS, hardware, and use of TLP.
  - shriek 5y ago
    I haven't run Windows in my Framework laptop so I can't really say if there's a difference but the issue in Linux was mostly because deep sleep wasn't enabled for some distros.
- willmorrison 5y ago
  Battery life on mine with a pretty minimal Arch install and TTY is around 10 hours when doing light web browsing and programming. Only problems I’ve had are hardware related. The trackpad isn’t 100% reliable (sometimes clicks don’t work and I have to press hard to get it to work again) and the hinge is far too loose. Love the laptop overall.
TallonRain 5y ago
I'm curious what the build quality is like. I've heard some complaints about QA and reliability issues with the hardware, but I don't know anyone in person who owns one of these devices. What has your experience been like?
- smasher164 5y ago
  I haven't had any hardware issues tbh. The only thing I would say is that the fans kick in pretty loud when doing anything remotely intensive. Even battery life has been fine, compared to my old Macbook Air. I've had to put in some work configuring drivers, since they're so new that they haven't landed in the distros yet. But NixOS makes that easy, so that's about it.
  - gorjusborg 5y ago
    Same here. I own two Framework machines and haven't had any issues so far. I also own an M1 air without any issues, but there was a class action lawsuit claiming that people were getting inordinate numbers of cracked screens (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-macbook-cracked-screen-lawsuit https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-macbook-cracked-s...). I haven't noticed inordinate fan noise running windows 10.
_peeley 5y ago
Exact same boat here - got my Framework a couple months ago when my Thinkpad X230 finally started showing its age, installed NixOS on it. The only disappointments so far have been battery life and heat management. I get maybe 5-6 hours from full charge, and the laptop gets super hot/noisy when sitting on anything other than a hard flat surface where the fans get maximum airflow (even using it when it's on my lap gets uncomfortable quick, and putting it on top of a blanket is out of the question).

rnk 5y ago

Seems too good to be true. Reasonable prices, upgradable, no soldered ram. So has it been a reliable Linux laptop, what's the battery life with your options?

dheera 5y ago
I've been using a Framework laptop for a month on Ubuntu 21.10 and pretty happy with it. Some hiccups but mostly answered by digging through forums. Battery life in operation is excellent, but it does drain 30% in 8 hours when on suspend which is a bit much. Not a dealbreaker but hope this can be solved.
- addcninblue 5y ago
  Out of my element here, but would be curious to see if this is something solvable in firmware (now open-sourced!) or if it's a hardware problem to begin with (power states? etc). Edit: Also curious if this issue is generally a hardware or firmware issue in most laptops, or if it's a mix of both.
  - 4cao 5y ago
    Could be caused by Modern Standby (by default newer laptops remain on even when nominally off, which has been known to cause issues). Some more details here: https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/145891-how-check-if-modern-standby-supported-windows-10-a.html https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/145891-how-check-if-mode...
- sydney6 5y ago
  I can imagine that the power draw in S3 could come from having (replacable) DDR Memory instead of (mostly soldered) LP-DDR Memory. edit: typo.
  - bestouff 5y ago
    The problem is that current Intel laptops don't use S3 anymore, they use S0ix a.k.a. "modern standby", an abomination where the CPU doesn't really sleep and the battery drains fast. Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. all have the same problem.
    - jpetso 5y ago
      S0ix has stronger requirements on the "correct" interaction between firmware/BIOS and OS, it offloads more work to the OS. Poorly implemented S0ix will drain the battery faster, but correctly implemented S0ix is as good as S3 or even better. Lenovo put out a buggy S3 implementation on some systems that hasn't been tested well because it's only an optional "Linux suspend" setting. Drains twice as fast as Linux with correctly implemented S0ix. And the worst thing is, nobody except Lenovo do can fix it because it's all on the BIOS level, and their China-based firmware team has other priorities. Well-implemented S3 is nice. But it's going to disappear. Both Intel and AMD are switching away with full force, vendors won't have S3 options in the BIOS going forward and the ones that remain will likely suck. On the other hand, S0ix support is coming together even on AMD platforms which were a little late to the party. Once it's working decently, I'd rather trust my OS than my laptop manufacturer's firmware team to suspend components correctly.
    - sydney6 5y ago
      I have a Thinkpad X1 from 2018 and by default it came with S0ix enabled and Lenovo later on added the S3 sleep state option through a BIOS update, called "Linux compatibility something".. Before that, one had to manually edit the DSD table to get rid of this evil burning-sleeping-laptop-in-backpack-feature called S0ix. Does the Framework Laptop, or other popular models from the other manfacturers you mentioned, not have a S3 sleep state option these days, i.e. S0ix only?
- throwaway2568 5y ago
  High battery drain during standby on Linux can be due to the system not entering the proper sleep state. I had this happen to me on an AMD machine lately, in that case disabling secure boot solved the issue. Here is a pretty detailed blog post in checking if that is the problem and how to deal with it on intel systems https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-states-linux https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-states-li...
  - tata71 5y ago
    > disabling secure boot solved the issue Lovely...
    - dheera 5y ago
      Isn't secure boot just a Microsoft thing to try to stymie competition by preventing booting OSes other than Windows?
      - AndroidKitKat 5y ago
        Debian seems to indicate otherwise: https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot https://wiki.debian.org/SecureBoot
- BlackLotus89 5y ago
  > cat /sys/power/mem_sleep If deep isn't selected do so and try again. You could have problems with your nvme coming out of suspend though. I got similar problems on my pinebook pro, but sadly this is all too common.
_zooted 5y ago
Having come from elementaryOS I can say that Fedora 35 is awesome. So much better!
- lillecarl 5y ago
  Having come from Debian, Ubuntu, and Manjaro I settled on what feels like the last distro I will use on my own systems: NixOS. It's not so much better, it's so much different. Every(ish) single package, every single line of configuration(ish) is under version control in a(couple) nix files. I share (most) of it between my systems. With flakes (and it's lockfile) it's a 100%(ish) deterministic system. Downside: The language is arcane to me and the tooling is dogshit. Not that I could've made it any better, but running my config repo through entre to rebuild on every write to get some promiscuous error nobody has had before sucks major D. Therefore I still have an Ubuntu container (because every desktop application targets Ubuntu) running with X11 forwarding for the few packages that aren't in nixpkgs that I wanna run. I also don't use home-manager, but chezmoi for my dotfiles. Since I want my home configuration to work on MacOS and other distros I might SSH. Atomic upgrades and downgrades are such a great feature I don't know how people can live without it now that I've experienced it. Note: The default configuration NixOS gives you is also shit, out of the box they don't ship a system like you'd want to consume it (nixos-generate-config). An anecdotal example is that Avahi isn't installed by default, which means chromecasting won't work until you figure out that you need Avahi, i18n config is shit too. So it's not all green grass, but definitely worth it, since every Nix line you write is an investment into making your experience better "forever" (I don't see NixOS going away anytime soon, very healthy activity on the project). Now after praising NixOS for awhile, let's praise the developers of all packages that are compiled into the lovely distros you all use. For me the KDE team can't get enough praise, the software is so damn good.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    > I also don't use home-manager, but chezmoi for my dotfiles. Since I want my home configuration to work on MacOS and other distros I might SSH. FYI, home manager works on MacOS just fine. I usually tell people to start with Home Manager as I think it's the best gateway drug to Nix stuff at the moment.
bo1024 5y ago
You nailed it, battery is the only downside I’ve had, not awful but probably say 3 hours of video playback, or 5-6 hours of web use. Haven’t used it unplugged all that much so very rough guesses. Bigger problem with my fedora install at least is battery draining while the lid is closed. Overall great machine Edit: I may be missing software updates that improve this, no idea
- reacharavindh 5y ago
  I very much wanted to hear about this and damn :-( Video playback must be hardware accelerated by now and be super efficient. Another worry was about low power sleep modes and waking up, and looks like it is not solved too. I might have to suck it up and buy the Mac for my needs after all. I have my trusty Linux desktop for all my big compute needs. I was hoping to make the mobile machine also run Linux, but the specific needs there (crisp display, nice battery life, Linux friendliness) seems to be an elusive goal.
  - DrBenCarson 5y ago
    * crisp display * nice battery life * Linux friendliness Not elusive at all, you can find an M1 MacBook Pro at any Apple, Best Buy, or Costco store.
    - Kinrany 5y ago
      M1 are not Linux-friendly at all.
      - DrBenCarson 5y ago
        I can run a Linux vm emulating x64 or aarch64 right now on M1… Not to mention zsh is the login shell out of the box… It’s more flexible that WSL2 in my opinion See https://github.com/lima-vm/lima https://github.com/lima-vm/lima for a very friendly QEMU wrapper running on M1
      - astrange 5y ago
        Run it in a VM. Works fine.
sneak 5y ago
The screen is very low-res and the GPU is weak. This is why I don't have one. If you don't care about pixels (seems common in PC-land), this is probably a good thing re: power consumption. I look at text all day, every day, and want it to be high res. It's been high res on my Macs for half a decade, and my XPS is even better. I'll get one of these once they fix the screen.
- aquova 5y ago
  The Framework has a 200 DPI screen. It's lower than say a MacBook, but I wouldn't consider that to be "low-res", especially in the laptop space.
- jonaustin 5y ago
  This 'low-res' comment makes no sense, I'll never go back to 1080p, but 2256x1504 is plenty IMO for text (I live in a CLI all day pretty much).
  - gorjusborg 5y ago
    Especially on a 13" screen. I have an XPS 13 with a 4k screen and I never use it at native resolution undocked because I'd need a magnifying glass to read anything on it.
    - sneak 5y ago
      You're always using it at native resolution, you're just adjusting your renderer settings. Nobody's saying your fonts should be tiny. I'm saying they should be rendered in high resolution. I have the same computer and display. I run it at 4k native but nothing is small, no magnifying glass required.
      - gorjusborg 5y ago
        > You're always using it at native resolution, you're just adjusting your renderer settings. No, when I wrote 'native resolution' I meant 1:1 pixel mapping, which is pretty obvious by context. Nobody has a laptop with a CRT on it these days.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
From what I've heard battery life is much worse on Linux than Windows. If you're willing to spend some time hacking around you can close the gap a bit, but it'll still be a gap.
- sva_ 5y ago
  Personally I can't confirm this. I've recently replaced the battery on my 2014 Thinkpad, and on low brightness I get around 8h of battery. That is of course, while not doing a lot of compute (compiling). I don't think this was much higher, back when I used Windows all those years ago, so I'm not sure what people are saying with low battery with Linux? I don't see how Windows could get me much more? And why would it?
  - Rebelgecko 5y ago
    If you have a Thinkpad, then the issues with the Framework (CPU sleep states, needing to turn of secure boot to hibernate properly, power management issues in Framework BIOS 3.06, etc) wouldn't necessarily apply to your laptop
- james-redwood 5y ago
  I’ve found this to be variable in my personal experience based on OS, hardware, and use of TLP.
- shriek 5y ago
  I haven't run Windows in my Framework laptop so I can't really say if there's a difference but the issue in Linux was mostly because deep sleep wasn't enabled for some distros.
willmorrison 5y ago
Battery life on mine with a pretty minimal Arch install and TTY is around 10 hours when doing light web browsing and programming. Only problems I’ve had are hardware related. The trackpad isn’t 100% reliable (sometimes clicks don’t work and I have to press hard to get it to work again) and the hinge is far too loose. Love the laptop overall.

TallonRain 5y ago

I'm curious what the build quality is like. I've heard some complaints about QA and reliability issues with the hardware, but I don't know anyone in person who owns one of these devices. What has your experience been like?

smasher164 5y ago
I haven't had any hardware issues tbh. The only thing I would say is that the fans kick in pretty loud when doing anything remotely intensive. Even battery life has been fine, compared to my old Macbook Air. I've had to put in some work configuring drivers, since they're so new that they haven't landed in the distros yet. But NixOS makes that easy, so that's about it.
- gorjusborg 5y ago
  Same here. I own two Framework machines and haven't had any issues so far. I also own an M1 air without any issues, but there was a class action lawsuit claiming that people were getting inordinate numbers of cracked screens (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-macbook-cracked-screen-lawsuit https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-macbook-cracked-s...). I haven't noticed inordinate fan noise running windows 10.

_peeley 5y ago

Exact same boat here - got my Framework a couple months ago when my Thinkpad X230 finally started showing its age, installed NixOS on it. The only disappointments so far have been battery life and heat management. I get maybe 5-6 hours from full charge, and the laptop gets super hot/noisy when sitting on anything other than a hard flat surface where the fans get maximum airflow (even using it when it's on my lap gets uncomfortable quick, and putting it on top of a blanket is out of the question).