21 ms·

I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

406 points by deevus 1y ago

deevus 1y ago
Author here. I'm posting this before bed. If there are any suggestions or questions I will answer in the morning.
- gclawes 1y ago
  I've wanted to buy a Framework to have a linux laptop for so long, but exactly this issue of battery life is what's holding me back. As soon as Asahi supports TouchID, I think my M1 will become a linux laptop...
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    It seems to be also (still) missing support for external displays and USB-4 in general? And according to use reports battery life seems quite awful compared to macOS?
- coldpie 1y ago
  FWIW, I use Arch Linux with XFCE on my Intel Framework 13 and I only lose a few percent battery per day in sleep mode. I suspect you could find some software settings to make this better, maybe worth digging a bit further.
  - deevus 1y ago
    What sleep modes does that support? The 7840HS only supported the "modern standby" mentioned in another comment.
    - coldpie 1y ago
      Sorry, I have no idea, it just worked this way out of the box so I never had to do any digging into it.
gjsman-1000 1y ago
> Apple Silicon is built upon ARM64 which is apparently core to such great battery life. Not really, actually. ARM isn’t terribly more efficient to decode than x86, and both are converted into micro-operations that are internal to the CPU. The real strength is Apple’s custom ARM cores; as evidenced by the failure of Qualcomm and MediaTek to make anything quite like it, even with the same manufacturing nodes.
- zipy124 1y ago
  I think as jeffbee said below it's not even the custom ARM cores, but rather Apple's ability to control not only the hardware but the software on-top of it. In a typical Windows machine you are dealing with your CPU and microcode made by AMD/Intel/Other, then the BIOS/Driver code written by your motherboard manufacturer, and your GPU from either the on-board, or dGPU from Intel/Nvidia/AMD and then Windows made by Microsoft. All of this leads to silly things like the ASUS ACPI driver bug [1] or Dell [2]. Apple does not suffer from this lack of control and communication, instead allowing tight integration. [1]: https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive [2]: https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-an-acpi-bug-in-my-dell-inspiron-5667-it-was-plaguing-me-for-8-years/ https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-...
  - Loudergood 1y ago
    Indeed, we've seen a serious lack of care for ACPI by firmware teams on the x86 side.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  Qualcomm is getting there with the Snapdragon X Elite. It's still significantly slower than the M4 but you can at least meaningfully compare them nowadays which is a strong come back from where they were when the M1 was introduced. We are likely to see improvements now that Microsoft buys Arm chips for their Surface laptops. I guess it was hard to justify the investment before.
deleted 1y ago
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jeffbee 1y ago
The ISA has nothing to do with the battery life. Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack. Framework doesn't control every level of the stack. Arguably they don't control any of it.
- corndoge 1y ago
  Yes, it's this. I also own an M4 mbp and an AMD framework 13. With both on maximum screen brightness, side by side, doing similar workloads, battery life isn't that much better on the M4. I think the difference maker is that the mac constantly decreases screen brightness when possible, turns the backlight completely off when there isn't any activity, heavily leverages power efficient scheduling and efficiency cores, no doubt turns off power to all peripherals whenever possible, and so on. And of course lid-closed suspend on a mac lasts indefinitely. Arch does none of these things and even on cohesive distros like Fedora there's only so much you can do in user land. Linux is designed for compatibility across a huge breadth of devices; darwin only has to support Mac hardware and can extract every ounce of power efficiency from deep hardware integration.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    IIRC the low power states of M series chips generally dips down further than most x86 CPUs do, and the way both the SoC And OS are designed are for racing to idle and coalescing tasks to reduce wakeups. On the MBPs specially the screen can also drop down to 1hz so the GPU isn’t wasting cycles redrawing static content. The result is that in more typical usage where the machine isn’t under a constant load, battery life is much better. When it’s sitting there idle displaying a web page it’s barely consuming any power at all, where most competing laptops at minimum are pulling at least 2-3x as much power between the CPU not being able to scale down that far and constantly getting woken to perform poorly scheduled tasks.
- gorjusborg 1y ago
  > Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack Exactly. Apple's way of doing things is about vertical integration of the stack, which is the polar opposite of how the PC market developed and largely still works. The vertical integration approach (where you control all the layers beneath the customer facing product) has the benefit of allowing you to optimize that customer experience by tweaking things anywhere in the stack. Power management in digital systems mostly comes down to being able to slow or turn off clocks when appropriate. Doing this well can be complicated, but you can tell that Apple has put a lot of energy into doing it. The downside of the vertical integration approach is that components cannot be sourced or replaced with off-the-shelf components, as the interfaces are not really standard, they are tailor made for the use case. For the Framework folks to pull off something like the M1's power sipping, they'd have to invest a lot of engineering time (a.k.a. money) and have strategic partnerships with hardware vendors and standards bodies to move the commodity chip market forward to support better power management. The thing is, one of the strengths of the Framework is that the hardware is commodity, making their devices easy to repair. Also, any work that the Framework folks do to move things forward also benefit their competitors, which can shrink the potential reward for doing so.
timpera 1y ago
I wish Framework offered a laptop with an ARM64 processor. I have a Surface Laptop 7 with a Snapdragon CPU on Windows 11 and it's been awesome so far. Insane battery life, especially in standby. I can reopen it after 48 hours and it only lost 3% of battery, while it stayed connected to WiFi and received notifications all along.
- nl 1y ago
  The difference here is Windows vs Linux, not ARM vs x64 (unfortunately) . Windows on Intel/AMD works just as well.
- fundatus 1y ago
  This! Would be an immediate buy from me.
- cpursley 1y ago
  My wife loves her (ancient) Surfacebook and is thinking of upgrading. Any comparability issues with the ARM chip?
  - timpera 1y ago
    No issues so far, almost 1 year in, but I don't use specialized software: only web browsers, Office suite, Obsidian, Dropbox, PowerToys, FileZilla, Putty, VLC, Notepad++, WSL and random .exe utilities. I've found the emulation to be pretty good, but avoid it if you plan to do any gaming.
- notnmeyer 1y ago
  i also want an arm laptop running linux with good hardware. hearing it a lot too. fingers crossed.
- sylens 1y ago
  This is what I'm really waiting for.
cardanome 1y ago
As a Linux user I feel you. The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world (for power users) but the hardware is so, so good. For me it is about having a completely silent setup. It is so, so hard to go back to noisy fans. I really hope Asahi Linux keep going so I can have the best of both worlds.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world I have to use Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops in my work. They all have their pros and cons, but I can’t say I’d ever argue that the Mac desktop experience is vastly inferior to the Linux desktop experience. Edit: Getting a lot of downvotes but most of the comments are about someone’s highly customized Linux desktop compared to completely vanilla Mac desktop. I’m referring to apples to apples comparison where they’re either some standard out of the box version or when customized with available tools and mods. Comparing your highly customized Linux desktop to a completely uncustomized Mac setup with no attempt at other tools or utilities isn’t an interesting comparison because it’s not apples to apples, it’s just a statement about your current preference.
  - yauneyz 1y ago
    Depends how you configure it. If you like things like tiling window managers and keyboard driven computing, Linux is in a category of its own.
    - presbyterian 1y ago
      There are a dozen or more options for tiling systems and keyboard-driven computing on macOS. Personally, one of the reasons I use macOS over Linux is because I find it easier to create custom keyboard commands and shortcuts. It’s all doable on Linux, sure, but on macOS there are several apps that make it easy.
      - aeroevan 1y ago
        If you haven't used something like i3/sway/awesomewm/hyprland on the linux side you won't know what you're missing. While there are several apps to create custom keyboard commands, only yabai+skhd come close to what's available on linux, and it's not even that close tbh.
atwrk 1y ago
> I haven’t measured it but I read that I should expect it to lose 3-4% in suspend every hour. Is that a joke? That has to be a bug. I have a thinkpad with a Ryzen 7 6850U, running debian, and lose at most 3% per day.
- mbreese 1y ago
  As with all things, it’s all dependent upon the details. OS, Bios, chip, they all can have an impact on battery consumption while sleeping. The linked (from the post) Reddit thread has many suggestions on how to fix this, but for the author, I don’t think it was ever resolved. The author of that Reddit post was also shocked. The reason why it works well for Apple is that they control everything. There are limited numbers of parts they have to support, so they can make sure it all works. In the PC world, there are many… many variables, even from the same OEM. It’s a legitimately hard problem and manufacturers aren’t particularly motivated to get it to work better (particularly with Linux). In fact, at this moment, there’s another post on the front page that talks about this exact issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288440 . It is about debugging an ACPI bug that has existed for years.
flkiwi 1y ago
This sounds like the so-called "modern standby" (S0 vs S3, if I remember correctly). I bought a thinkpad a while back with "modern standby" and the thing wouldn't last the night suspended, and would often wake me up with its fans howling and end up being very, very hot while suspended. I disabled "modern standby" in the BIOS and it was back to sleeping for weeks without losing charge. I have no idea if that's what's going on with Framework laptops, but "modern standby" is one of the dumbest changes I've ever seen in PC hardware. To my understanding it's to make laptops behave more like phones, but I've never experienced any meaningful difference in resume behavior between S0 and S3 suspend.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  The standby issues with Framework laptops (at least the early ones, I don’t know about recent developments) was a well known issue. I recommended Framework to someone looking for a laptop a while ago and they were bit by the standby battery drain issue. I felt bad having recommended it to them because I assumed such a basic issue would have been addressed in a laptop that was so highly regarded.
  - maverwa 1y ago
    Some of the issues have been addressed. For example, iirc, there was a bug where pulling out the power plug while the lid was closed would trigger the device to wake up. Some other issues remain. Largest I am aware of is independent from the hardware, but an issue with suspend-to-disk & kernel lockdown, which prevents deep sleep.
- stephen_g 1y ago
  I had* an 11th Gen Intel NUC that couldn’t sleep at all for something like a year due to EFI bugs… They finally did eventually fix the regression but really, it’s just incredible - if one company should be able to do EFI right it’s Intel! I’m not sure if this was related to “modern standby” (it was around that time if I recall) but that hasn’t really helped anything. This is a desktop so why they insist on deprecating real standby for everything is beyond me… * I actually still have it but it became my home server, so now doesn’t ever need to standby, luckily.
daviddever23box 1y ago
I've been using the Core i7-1165G7 mainboard for the 13, which works well enough with a large amount of RAM and has mature OS support.
aurareturn 1y ago
What mission do you love from Framework? Is it environmental? If so, I seriously doubt that the lifetime pollution of a Framework laptop is better than an Apple Silicon Mac. Macbooks tend to last a very long time. I used my Intel Macbook Air for 10 years. After that, I sold it and maybe it continued to get used by the second owner. While you can keep upgrading Framework laptops (parts require shipping/pollution to manufacture), I doubt it'll last a decade or someone wants to upgrade it for a decade to keep up. Apple also has recycling programs and it seems to do quite well when it comes to using recycled materials. I doubt Framework is big enough to do these things as well as Apple. Framework laptops are often more than doubled the price of similar spec'ed Windows laptops. They're also quite a bit more expensive than Apple laptops in the same class. Framework is one of those things that is great for virtue signaling but doesn't make sense in real life. Edit: You can buy an M4 Air for $799 on sale frequently.[0] Meanwhile, a similar spec'ed Framework with a slower AMD CPU/GPU is $1,517.00.[1] So the repairability angle just doesn't seem worth it. If the Air breaks, just buy a new one. Keep in mind that the M4 Air has a better display, significantly faster CPU, faster GPU, significantly more battery life, is fanless, better speakers, much better trackpad, and a thinner profile. [0]https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/27/200-off-every-m4-macbook-air/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/27/200-off-every-m4-macboo... [1]https://frame.work/products/laptop13-diy-amd-ai300/configuration/new https://frame.work/products/laptop13-diy-amd-ai300/configura...
- deevus 1y ago
  For me it's the repairable nature. Prior to the Framework 13 I had a bunch of Thinkpads until the enshittification by Lenovo in recent years.
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    How often have you needed to repair a MacBook? The enhanced repairability is basically insurance in case of a fault. Compared to a MacBook, or insurance for a MacBook, this insurance is overpriced. As for the environment, the power consumption + larger design with extra parts to make it repairable + how few people ever buy parts makes this a virtue signaling wash.
b3lvedere 1y ago
I guess it's a bit on how various technologies are optimized within the system. My Steam Deck can hold quite some battery juice for a while, but i will never be more amazed than my original Nintendo DS, that still has lots of battery capacity even after years and years of neglect. For my current laptops i have been ignoring the battery completely. I rather have max performance, so every energy saving thing gets disabled. Most of the time it's connected to power anyway.
maverwa 1y ago
The complaint about power usage in suspend is especially sad because it’s pretty much a common problem for Linux on laptops. Not sure if that’s what applies here, but the numbers about match what I see with my Framework. Basically: if you want to use secure boot you usually also want kernel lockdown mode, and you cannot hibernate a lockdowned kernel. At least not without out-of-tree patches. IMHO that’s a giant issue. If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low. And telling people to not run secure boot or lockdown is not really a good answer either. Especially since the default installer already sets those things up. I get that „Linux on laptops“ is not a priority big enough to get a proper fix for that. And that it’s not an easy issue to fix. But the current state is really really sad.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  > If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low. This is cope. An Apple Silicon Macbook does not need to suspend to block devices to save energy (they only do this when the battery is empty). ChromeOS doesn't offer hibernate at all. The only reason that a Framework can't have good battery life in an operating state is that nobody is paying attention to the details.
  - N-Krause 1y ago
    And what are those details? Sounds like you know specifics that I'd like to also know. If you're claiming it is just an oversight, then please back it up.
    - nagisa 1y ago
      While I don't have any suggestions on how to look at the relevant metrics, a big part of the issue is the parts selection and having them power off properly. 1%/h is just 0.5W (for a 50Wh battery) which isn't a lot, but fail to bring a component or two to shutdown or sufficiently low power state and you'll observe exactly this behaviour. Of course some drain is going to be almost inevitable just to keep memory contents sufficiently refreshed, but with proper power-saving states memory can go appreciably below 0.5W.
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
As suggested in the blog post, the battery life issue is complex. You do need a CPU/SoC that’s efficient, and while Intel and AMD can do this it’s traditionally been a struggle for them. Next, the OS needs to be capable of taking full advantage of the chip’s efficiency. Windows could be decent here in, but Microsoft doesn’t believe in an operating system that’s ever truly idle (and neither do the third parties living in your taskbar tray), so even on relatively efficient laptops much of that potential is wasted. Linux is kind of all over the place, depending on your hardware, which governor you’re using, how it’s configured, whether your browsers are configured to use GPU acceleration or are burning power intensive CPU cycles, etc. Then there’s sleep. Most of the problems here come down to x86 laptops not implementing proper S3 sleep but only “modern standby”, which attempts to emulate the sleep mode that Apple uses that allows for emails to be fetched etc while in a near-sleep low-power state. The problem is that modern standby is not implemented well in Windows or Linux and how individual laptop firmwares handle it can vary a great deal, and the sum of it is that it generally speaking doesn’t work, which is why so many x86 laptops drain themselves after being “asleep” for a couple of days. My ThinkPad does this too. It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more. This seems to require a level of integration between the hardware and the OS (an Arch based Linux in this case) than practically all laptop vendors are either willing or capable of.
- BirAdam 1y ago
  Excellent point with Steam Deck. The machine is proof that x86 and Linux can do it and simply don’t.
  - dpoloncsak 1y ago
    While proof, I think it also highlights the root cause of the issue. Linux is developed to be compatible with different hardware setups. SteamOS and MacOS are both (supposed to be) locked to their respective hardware. It works on that hardware, but ymmv on anything else.
    - 1y ago
pclmulqdq 1y ago
The Arm architecture isn't why Apple Silicon is so good at this. Apple's silicon engineers have been very good at designing a system of power states that is extremely efficient, and have tight coupling with the OS. Linux on a framework laptop gives you none of this co-design.
- apozem 1y ago
  Exactly - Apple hardware is designed for its software, and vice versa. They get battery gains across the stack. I remember when the M1 Macs first came out, an Apple engineer revealed they'd optimized the hardware so one specific low-level operation macOS does all the time was 5x faster than on Intel [0]. [0]: https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/the_m1_macs https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/the_m1_macs
  - AceJohnny2 1y ago
    > Apple hardware is designed for its software, and vice versa Sometimes I find it hard to believe that Apple Silicon implements 2 different togglable memory models, just so that Rosetta can better emulate x86 https://www.sra.uni-hannover.de/Publications/2024/wrenger_24_jsa.pdf https://www.sra.uni-hannover.de/Publications/2024/wrenger_24...
  - simonask 1y ago
    It’s not even a particularly obscure low-level operation: atomic add. Every computer in the world performs that exact instruction a huge number of times running normal, non-Apple software. The key insight is the kind of “vertical integration” providing the kind of feedback loop to spot the opportunity.
jasoneckert 1y ago
The same points made about battery life with Apple Silicon in this blog post equally apply to Snapdragon Elite X laptops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMTJm3vmh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMTJm3vmh0
whatarethembits 1y ago
Battery life is the only thing stopping me from getting out of the Apple ecosystem. As soon as a viable Linux laptop with "enough" battery life becomes available, I'll make the switch. At that point there's nothing on Apple side that couldn't be done better in Linux (with a bit of work, but that's okay). I travel a lot, and often on standby for work during that time. I need to be confident that when I pull the laptop out, there's ALWAYS enough juice to respond to a situation immediately without worrying about anything else. If Framework offered hot swappable batteries, even if a quick restart is required, I'd be fine with that because at least I wouldn't be stranded in that case. And I'd be happy to pay as much as a MacBook, or a bit more even, purely for ideological reasons. Apple's dominance is bad for all of us.
- bo1024 1y ago
  I think you could shut down a framework, swap the battery, and boot back up in probably 3 minutes or maybe only 1.
  - dhosek 1y ago
    My first Apple laptop, a Titanium PowerBook, you could sleep the machine and swap the battery and not have to reboot.
  - adolph 1y ago
    > swap the battery I count 14, 8 and 5 screws to swap the battery: https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery/425 https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery/425 https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery+Replacement+Guide/85?lang=en https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery+Replacement+Guide/85... https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery/278?lang=en https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery/278?lang=en
- sedatk 1y ago
  Windows ARM laptops are quite good in that regard, but I'm not sure how close they're to Macs.
- eigenspace 1y ago
  Instead of a hot-swappable battery, why not just carry a large battery-bank that can charge your laptop over USB-C? That way you don't even need to reboot. Browsing around on Amazon, I see there's actually quite a few battery banks that with over 60W of output, and ~100Wh of capacity for under 100€
pjmlp 1y ago
My Thinkpad P15 battery was also great after two weeks vacation, with Windows 11 Professional, and Intel CPU.
deleted 1y ago
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bigpeopleareold 1y ago
"I still love my Framework, despite its flaws. I will just keep it plugged in so that it’s ready to go when I want to use it." That sounds like a plan! I suppose that if I was distant from an outlet for a long enough time, the battery life would be great, but I'm rarely if ever. It's nice not to be tethered to a wire, but it's not bad really overall.
jon9544hn 1y ago
Reminds me of the windows laptop-closed-but-loses-power-while-hibernating bug that’s been around for ages (10+ years at minimum). Linus (LTT) has made multiple video regarding that over the years. Obviously, that’s windows. But I do wonder why sleep modes in Linux/windows don’t actually work effectively. I mean they ‘work’ as in slowed battery drain, but still nowhere near any of the MacBook series (with/without the M* chips). Idk something about them, they get it right..
_1tem 1y ago
The difference is fundamental. A product where the hardware and software is built by the same entity will always work better in the long run. It all comes down to decades of iteration and low-level optimizations that aren't easy to do any other way. This is why you'll pry my Apple devices from my cold, dead hands. Even if a super magical alternative device manufacturer with the perfect open source OS appeared tomorrow they wouldn't be able to replicate the decades of compounding interest that have been invested into the Apple ecosystem. The value of that compound interest far outweighs any other concerns I might have about Apple devices, such as "lock in" or declining software quality (valid concerns, still worth bearing the cost). Apple devices are objectively and measurably better not just on metrics like battery life. Linux nerds like DHH and his heroic Omarchy effort are simply wasting their time because they hate Apple.
g8oz 1y ago
I have heard anecdotally that the Snapdragon arm window laptops have amazing battery life. I'd be interested in hearing from people who have used these as well as the Mx MacBooks.
999900000999 1y ago
I want to love framework, and I really do want to get behind their mission, but a few things stand out. First and this is the elephant in the room, it's probably better for the environment to buy a refurbished think pad. The most environmentally friendly product is one that gets reused instead of going to a landfill. The 13-in framework only offers one SSD slot, The expansion Bay offers a nice storage option but these are a bit overpriced and then you're down to three ports. The design itself feels really prone to failure, if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail which seems like a really weird design choice. It probably would have been smarter to do something that requires actually screwing in components. To get comparable specs, you seriously need to spend about 50% more on average, and this is just me comparing ThinkPads to Frameworks. If I wanted to look at laptops on sale you can easily find framework specs at half price. Finally the support issues don't really inspire confidence, if my Lenovo laptop has issues I can walk into a variety of authorized repair centers and just let them sort it out. Framework simply doesn't have this, I don't have the appetite to pay a premium price and not have this as an option. Extended warranty options are iffy. You have to first pay more for the prebuilt laptop, and then at the performance tier ( Amd 350) you have to drop $1,690 to get a 3 year warranty. It's out of stock anyway. The Lenovo E14 Gen 7 with a Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 255H Processor is about 1030$ direct from Lenovo with a 3 year warranty (2 years is available, and is my risk tolerance sweet spot, so I can save 60$ there). The only reason I'm looking at the E14 is I REALLY want two SSD drives. If I'm ok with just one I can buy a refurbished P14 for around 780$. I think the core issue is Framework is still a boutique brand, if they ever reach the size of a major OEM then they're pricing will be more competitive.
- Zak 1y ago
  > if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail If you're plugging and unplugging USB-C cables all the time, eventually the ports are going to fail, but we generally consider plugging things into USB-C acceptable. The Framework expansion modules are just USB-C ports, but they're not subject to much twisting or bending when using the modules so they should last longer.
  - 1y ago
sharpshadow 1y ago
The standby experience is so bad on Linux laptops that I almost always shutdown and optimise for boot speed. On the MB a shutdown is quite rare and getting into the system takes 1s with the fingerprint reader. That’s such a huge difference it feels like magic.
- j1mc 1y ago
  I've mentioned it elsewhere in this thread, but installing TLP makes a huge difference for suspend on Linux laptops. https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html
impure-aqua 1y ago
I don't think Framework will be able to compete on efficiency with their design philosophy. The NVMe disk is swappable, which means it has its own controller which manages power management itself. I did my research to pick an efficient SSD and ended up with a Lexar NM790. It tops Tom's efficiency charts and comes in third place for lowest idle power consumption [0]. This is still ~0.8W at idle. On a 60Wh battery an idling drive alone will kill the battery in 3 days. Now technically there is the APST (Autonomous Power State Transition) feature in the NVMe specification. Is there some lower APST power state that can get the power draw down? Potentially, but that is a feature well beyond the purview of any SSD reviews I have seen, so I don't know- does this drive have reliable and well-implemented APST state support? How does this interact with the platform-specific sleep state implementation, which presumably wakes the disk sometimes to do some Modern Standby features- how often is it spending time in that 0.8W state versus lower? This can vary between board rev or BIOS version certainly. Beyond the actual drive configuration and ACPI interaction, there is also kernel interaction. Do certain drives behave poorly with Linux? Etc etc. On the RAM side of things, they are using DDR5 and not LPDDR5. There is a lower voltage on LPPDR5 which is a constant inefficiency, but also LPDDR5 has dynamic voltage scaling and dynamic frequency scaling. There is also technically some voltage drop across the SODIMM connector which you don't need to contend with when you solder RAM, which would be a constant source of loss, but I am not sure how significant that is. Beyond this you have different behaviour for every model of RAM. This post on the Framework forum shows the user could get 7.82 days of suspend time with the HMCG66MEBSA092N DDR5-4800MHz 16GB kit whereas only 2.25 days with the CT2K48G56C46S5 DDR5-5600MHz 96GB kit [1]. Consider that there are effectively infinite combinations of memory people can run, and even inside a model series, vendors can swap their chip providers, etc. Which kits give the best battery endurance? I can't tell you. Now someone could certainly embark on a long adventure to test different drives, RAM kits, and measure their performance, recommend tunables for the Linux kernel you want to set for each particular set of hardware, etc. But this is effectively what Apple is doing for you with the MacBook. They are choosing their memory supplier, their flash supplier, and integrating as much as possible into their SoC with presumably an entire team focused on extracting the most efficient behaviour out of both. Consider this same thing extends to display behaviour (beyond VRR support, which I believe Framework has now, you also have local dimming behaviour to tune on the MBP), wireless behaviour, all sorts of embedded controllers that Apple can wrap inside the SoC that I probably wouldn't think of... I don't see how a modular system like Framework can achieve anything close to the idle efficiency of a MacBook. [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/lexar-nm790-ssd-review/2 https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/lexar-nm790-ssd-review/... [1] https://community.frame.work/t/impact-of-ram-density-on-suspend-power-consumption/57664 https://community.frame.work/t/impact-of-ram-density-on-susp...
TYPE_FASTER 1y ago
I think Apple's success at using power management data from their mobile products to make computer hardware with really good power management is highlighting just how bad computer power management has been. When you close the lid on a laptop, there are a lot of layers that all have to do the right thing. How is Windows configured? How do the drivers installed on that laptop handle the Windows state transitions? How do all the pieces of hardware on that laptop (CPU, etc.) work together to implement the various states? I think it is possible for a computer manufacturer like Framework to work with operating system vendors like Microsoft and Canonical, and hardware vendors like Intel and AMD to improve how power management is implemented in their hardware. There is always some level of "friction" involved when you are trying to integrate across different vendors. Some of the best Windows hardware I've used was made by Microsoft. The Surface line, at least in my experience, is really good. It will require an investment of course, but I think it is possible.
thebitstick 1y ago
This will never happen, but the ideal laptop for me would be a Framework Laptop 13/16 with an Apple Silicon mainboard and OLED display. The soldered RAM of the Framework Desktop has already opened the door to soldered RAM on Framework Laptop mainboards.
seabrookmx 1y ago
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.
- mrbonner 1y ago
  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.
  - throwaway240403 1y ago
    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.
    - LTL_FTC 1y ago
      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 https://github.com/apple/container
dangus 1y ago
As someone who moved from an MacBook Pro I share the pain, but I also made the following adjustments: 1. I just shut down the computer fully more often. It’s annoying so I don’t always do it, but I’ll do it if I know I’m not using the computer as much. 2. I carry a 98Wh battery pack with me. If my laptop is fully dead it’s not a big deal because a full battery pack charges it all the way up, or if both are full it extends the battery life to be MacBook level. Since the framework is lighter than my Mac was anyway it’s not such a big deal.
hk1337 1y ago
I love the Framework hardware but not all that impressed with the choice of operating systems that are available. That’s not really Framework’s problem though.
- AgentElement 1y ago
  There is a choice of operating systems, which cannot be said about macs.
- noisy_boy 1y ago
  What does that mean? I thought they offer Windows and Linux options? If you are referring to distros of the latter, you can install whichever you like, no?
  - hk1337 1y ago
    Yes, you can even bring your own, the problem isn't with Framework in my case.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
Same issue I've had - the issue is specifically for Linux (Win on Framework doesn't suffer from this). One thing I found was certain modules like USB-A or HDMI drawing power even when suspended.
wmf 1y ago
I wonder if this is just the S0ix problem.
victor9000 1y ago
The best thing about owning a framework is that you can easily recover from silly events like spilling an entire latte on your laptop. I've done this twice so far and both times it cost me $99 to swap out the keyboard and get back to a stock look and feel.
- samtheDamned 1y ago
  I just got a framework 12 and the first day I set it up a latte spilled all over it and thankfully the keyboard survived but the peace of mind that, even if it wasn't, a replacement keyboard is $50 was/is so valuable.
- manmal 1y ago
  Or you could get a Mighty Mug or similar one that doesn’t spill.
jadenPete 1y ago
I really, really want an ARM laptop with great Linux support. It's very difficult to justify buying an non-M series laptop today, when the M series laptops outperform x86 laptops in battery life by such a wide margin. I'm sure some of that is because Apple controls their entire hardware and software stack and can optimize macOS for battery life, but it's hard not to believe that the processor architecture (i.e. x86) is mostly to blame for the terrible battery life of most laptops.
- babypuncher 1y ago
  I think it's still up in the air whether a decent non-Apple laptop/desktop class ARM chip will come to market before Intel and/or AMD narrow the efficiency gap enough that the hassle won't be worth it.
  - OJFord 1y ago
    Who would make it? Do the likes of Broadcom have the vision & ambition to push into that class? I could see it happening if AMD decided Arm was the way to progress, but that would be bold too. (AMD does already have an architecture licence though I believe.)
- AuthAuth 1y ago
  The M Series doesn't get battery life rep due to it being arm its purely due to Apple optimizing for battery life and partly marketing it a ton. You can get x86 chips that can do 24HR playing a video which is 5 hours more than the M2/M3 laptops and keep in mind thats running bloated ass windows which probably uses 2-3x the system resources of macOS. I'm pretty sure the snapdragon chips out preform Apple silicon at almost every metric.
  - pier25 1y ago
    > I'm pretty sure the snapdragon chips out preform Apple silicon at almost every metric. No, not even close. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-15-M4-review-The-fanless-M4-SoC-is-years-ahead-of-the-competition.976933.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-15-M4-review...
dreamcompiler 1y ago
TFA suggests ARM64 might be the answer. It's not that simple. Asahi Linux on Apple silicon still uses substantial energy when the lid is closed, compared to MacOS on the same hardware. With Asahi you might get a couple of days of sleep before the battery dies but you definitely won't get a month.
- teekert 1y ago
  That might be down to the weirdness of (or Linux's unfamiliarity with) Apple silicon, not ARM in general.
fidotron 1y ago
This isn't just a question of direct power management features or use of custom silicon, but there has been curious noise for years out of Apple over a major cause: memory management. In modern systems memory becomes a major source of power consumption, so reducing how much if it you need to keep active results in big gains, on top of all the other benefits of doing this. This is partly used as the reasoning to explain why Swift has evolved in the direction it has, but also various apps that suspend/resume their state at a higher level than simply relying on the OS to do it. It would take a gargantuan effort, which would likely annoy almost everyone, to get a desktop Linux distro to do this.
- macintux 1y ago
  I believe that's also why Apple has been conservative with the amount of RAM in their phones.
- saagarjha 1y ago
  I don't think Apple does anything particularly special with memory management as it relates to power.
cantalopes 1y ago
I have also noticed that when i'm dual booting to windows i get way more battery life than on manjaro with gnome, closed lid or active work. I guess it's much easier to oeganize battery optimizations in one house unfortunately
shirro 1y ago
I don't remember having "range anxiety" under S3 suspend on my old intel laptops. It just worked and they woke up reasonably reliably and quickly under linux if you had a regular thin and light with integrated graphics. I had an Apple intel laptop that might have been marginally faster returning to life but it basically just worked on either. The move to modern standby has been a mess. It seems to have improved a lot but my kid always shuts down his windows laptop before putting it in a bag because it seems to have become urban folklore that laptops turn on in bags, overheat and get damaged. That is new. I carried laptops in bags suspended for years and nobody thought that. It just worked.
- _kulang 1y ago
  I’ve certainly had that particularly with older Dell XPS computers. So has Linus at LTT, which I suppose how it entered folklore. I say this as my lab mate had his laptop do exactly that just last week, with up to date windows and a newer XPS laptop. It simply has never happened to my Macs
- notpushkin 1y ago
  Modern standby is a disaster.
- WillPostForFood 1y ago
  I think it is more lived experience than urban folklore - it definitely happens.
  - dwayne_dibley 1y ago
    can confirm, my MS Surface did it all the time, something about shutting the lid before removing the power supply. I can't recall now, but it was the thing that make me switch back to apple.
- mips_avatar 1y ago
  As someone whose job was to improve Windows fundamentals this makes me really sad. I worked on making Windows respect modern standby better, and there just wasn't a whole lot of interest in making it work. The whole OS needs a lot of considered improvement, and it's not getting it.
Havoc 1y ago
Are people away from power sources that often? Don’t think I’ve thought about battery level on my work (windows) laptop once. Home, office, conference rooms - everything has usb C docks
- QuercusMax 1y ago
  When I used to commute via company bus in the bay area, it mattered to me; also when I'm using my laptop out and about in the city, I'd prefer not to have to worry about finding a seat with a charger. Of course, nowadays power banks are getting so cheap and lightweight, I just toss a couple in my bag, and don't really worry about it. I just ordered one of the Haribo power banks all the backpackers are raving about.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  Yeah this seems like a complete non-issue to me. A laptop doesn't need to run all day on battery; if you are working any length of time you're going to be near an AC outlet at some point.
koinedad 1y ago
It’s hard when you’ve had such amazing hardware. I’m still intrigued by framework myself and hope to get one in the near future!
dash2 1y ago
I quit Linux around 2010 and got a MacBook Air, partly because suspend/resume kept breaking. So pleased to know that 15 years later, it still doesn’t work. Proprietary hardware and software for the win.
dvrp 1y ago
Someday I’ll be able to go back to Linux. In the meantime, Return of the Mac.
- LTL_FTC 1y ago
  That’s a fun song
MisterTea 1y ago
Funny side story is years ago when AMD was developing the Opteron A series I commented somewhere that AMD is making a terrible blunder and is going after the wrong market. They needed to start the other way around, and build a kick ass Arm + GPU SoC that was more akin to a PC in terms of performance and not a throw away raspberry pi SoC. Bigger caches, wider memory bus, PCIe e.g. for NVMe, powerful GPU. Essentially something general purpose that could power a mid range laptop/work PC/Desktop/Embedded but designed to be cost effective and crazy power efficient. "There is totally a market for it." I said. People responded along the lines of "And what is going to run on that?" And they were right. At the time there would have been no killer app, not even Linux could propel it IMO. Of course Apple has the ability to steer their entire ship just like they steered from PowerPC to x86-64. So kudos to them for proving I was right ;-) Though I still want my AMD Arm GPU SoC...
- mschuster91 1y ago
  For that, you'd actually need a high performance ARM core on one side (and frankly, it's just Apple at that point, they needed well over a decade to get there), and you need some way to make legacy x86/x86_64 applications to run smoothly to get over the chicken-egg effect, and you need some way for all the legacy hardware devices that people plug in into their computers. Apple could do it not just because of their experience from the iOS device family and the IP they acquired for it, but because they didn't need to take care that much about the issues in the Windows ecosystem. Apple has long since discouraged third party hardware that can't be driven with libusb from userspace as kexts have been deprecated, Apple has been pretty ruthless in forcing developers to keep their software compileable, and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks and extensions to make performant emulation of x86 code possible.
  - MisterTea 1y ago
    Well the architectural backwards compatibility issues are Apple's problem really. I was thinking of a pure Arm machine running Linux/BSD/9.
    - 1y ago
ChaoPrayaWave 1y ago
I've been on Linux for over a decade, and honestly, getting lured into fixing things has become second nature.
j45 1y ago
I wish I didn't have to optimize the Framework battery myself. Buying an SSD and RAM that uses less power when idling helped, a handful of settings helped, but then I realized, this laptop is near perfect, and it stands out even more that I have to compensate for lack of a power management setup out of the box. It was early for Framework though, and it otherwise ran flawlessly. I hope battery power management can be a first class citizen on Framework one day soon. The rest is so solid and I wish Framework sustainability for a long, long time. For now, I need my laptop to be invisible so I can do what I need.
webdevver 1y ago
we need to do to UEFI what Stalin did to the intellectual classes
dustbunny 1y ago
Is this person using deep sleep? I always make sure I'm on deep sleep. I know it's gross: Put this in a file: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="mem_sleep_default=deep In /etc/default/grub.d/90_memsleepdefault.cfg Then run update-grub And reboot. Run this to check if deep sleep is enabled: cat /sys/power/mem_sleep If it says [deep] your good
- deevus 1y ago
  I will try this. Thank you
- ritcgab 1y ago
  This is "obsolete" S3 sleep. Newer CPUs don't support this.
farmin 1y ago
Can someone tell me if hibernate works on the kubuntu Focus IR14. I love kubuntu but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere really don’t like inability for my thinkpad to hibernate without losing charge. I’d buy a Linux first machine if I knew it would just work.
diego_sandoval 1y ago
I've never had this issue, because I simply power off my laptop when I'm not using it. Am I the only one?
osigurdson 1y ago
When I switch my Thinkpad X1 to Arch, I was expecting a massive battery life downgrade. However, it lasts at least as long as Windows or possibly longer.
sandGorgon 1y ago
you folks should really try the lenovo yoga series. especially this year's yoga slim aura edition (which has the intel lunar lake chips). The ipex-llm extensions are fairly stable and work very well ( https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-pytorch https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-pytorch ) and the build quality of the laptop is exactly like the macbook air - i have both.
- yoavm 1y ago
  The discussion is mostly around battery life. How's the battery life on your Yoga, how much power does it lose on standby, and what operating system do you use?
  - sandGorgon 1y ago
    windows. all day battery life. holds up pretty well to the macbook air 15 at similar workloads. macbook does get 1-1.5 hour more battery life. The lunar lake is an insane chip.
pachico 1y ago
I am forced to use a MacBook M4 at work but I have and love my Framework 13 Intel. Battery management is superior in MacOS but I can leave my Framework suspended for more than at least a week (I never measured how long it can stay like this). I run vanilla Ubuntu with TLP, though, which might be the trick.
- vocoda 1y ago
  What’s TLP?
  - yoavm 1y ago
    https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html
- j1mc 1y ago
  TLP is definitely the trick. TLP makes a huge difference in improving battery life while on suspend in Linux - especially since laptop makers stopped supporting S3 sleep.
captainregex 1y ago
It’s crazy you have to go like four comments deep and into the sub convo before you find mention of windows on arm- apple silicon is just so dominant in the zeitgeist for people who think about this stuff
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  If there were a Windows on ARM laptop that blew peoples' socks off (the way the M1 MacBooks did initially), it'd make waves but that has yet to happen. The initial round of Snapdragon laptops had battery life that was better than what Intel/AMD machines were capable of, but not quite MacBook level and performance wasn't quite there either. Then Intel's Lunar Lake came out and was about as good or better with none of the compatibility problems, basically stealing Qualcomm's thunder.
nurettin 1y ago
> had a short stint with Arch Linux. It wasn’t stable enough It is all fun and games until they break libc on the next update.
vander_elst 1y ago
Honest question, how is it possible that Macs are so much better in terms of hardware? Context: I use a MacBook at work and a Lenovo with Linux at home and now I might need to change my personal laptop, but I struggle to find (hardware) reasons why not to buy a MacBook, a MacBook Air is actually cheaper than another laptops with similar specs. There's still the ideology of repairability and openness which still plays a big role for me, but from a hardware perspective I see a clear winner. How is it possible that no other manufacturer can come close to the apple offering? There are big players (Lenovo, Dell, HP etc...) that I would have thought they would have the capabilities for producing similar products, why do they lag so far behind?
- dijit 1y ago
  CPUs are the main reason. They’re about 1-1.5 generations ahead of AMDs mobile offering, and OEMs have sweetheart deals with Intel, which is more like 4-5 generations behind. So flagship business laptops (which are the only comparable laptops in terms of build quality to Macbooks) are hamstrung, and everything else is built like a matchbox even with AMD cpus.
  - mmcnl 1y ago
    It's everything else where MacBooks excel too. The build quality is insane, I've never seen a laptop with as little flex as a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The keyboards are now finally great, and the display is amazing as well. Trackpad is best in class too. Another thing: the displays are glossy, but still not very reflective. The Windows laptops glossy displays are so much more reflective, they are unusable outside. Also something worth mentioning, the MacBook displays get really bright. A high-end OLED display hardly goes above 400 nits. A MacBook Pro can go to 600 nits and outside it goes to 1600 nits. This is the difference between being able to use a laptop outside, and not. Durability: if you're not doing anything crazy the MacBook will look brand new even after years of usage. Notable exception is the cheap plastic key caps which degrade very quickly, a bummer. So the MacBooks beat the competition easily from a hardware quality perspective, and we haven't even talked about the elephant in the room yet: CPU performance, battery life and fan noise, obviously Apple is even further ahead in this area. And then price, as strange as it sounds, both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are cheaper than the competition. Disclaimer: I don't own a MacBook personally because I think macOS is not great, but that's probably the only reason why I'm not buying a MacBook. I would happily pay same the price of a MacBook Pro for a similar Windows laptop if it existed. It does not. There are always compromises.
darkamaul 1y ago
I recently made the move from a Framework to a M4. And god that’s so convenient to simply be able to close or open the lid to instantly use the laptop. On the Framework, I had to get it plugged before I could turn it on, due to a problem with the RTC battery [0]. There is actually a known defect here but they provide a free replacement _and_ a guide to help you perform the swap [1]. [0] https://community.frame.work/t/viability-of-an-ml-1220-rechargable-battery-for-rtc-cmos-11th-gen/17664/43 https://community.frame.work/t/viability-of-an-ml-1220-recha... [1] https://knowledgebase.frame.work/fr/how-do-i-replace-the-rtc-battery-in-my-framework-laptop-Hk406Lc1t https://knowledgebase.frame.work/fr/how-do-i-replace-the-rtc...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jakelindsay 1y ago
you just cant beat apple silicon battery life
whatever1 1y ago
I keep reading the argument that x86 laptops have horrible battery life & sleep draining issues because of the laptop OEM incompetence. If that is the case then why the snapdragon CPU laptops don’t face these issues?
camillomiller 1y ago
Imagine someone saying the same (“it’s awful and doesn’t really actually work but I want to love it”) about anything else than Linux or FOSS and you’ll be privy to an outside perspective on a very peculiar form of nerd delusion.
teekert 1y ago
It's a shame indeed. I've been a long, long time Linux user and just trained myself to always power off (although I feel that in the old days this was less of an issue? Can that be? Just install ACPI-tools or something?), feels more tidy anyway. But yeah that's what it does to you to always grab a laptop that either has 0 battery or is cooking, from a backpack. On the other hand, yesterday my sons Windows Laptop (we keep an open mind in this family + school requires it) was also cooking in his backpack so there is that... How are System76 laptops in this regards? You'd think somehow because of the hardware control they should have this down? At least when sticking to Po#@Po!s!. Ah well, you can see that the money is on the server part when it comes to Linux ;)
yonisto 1y ago
I'm using Framework with Windows and AMD and I have excellent hibernate/sleep time... It is really a Linux thing. I remember a post on reddit that claims that the Bluefin distribution has excellent battery life. It amazes me how the legend of ARM being more efficient than x86 took hold. I'm not saying that we don't have a more efficient ARM processors BUT it has nothing to do with the ISA. What you gain with a simple encoder (ARM) you gain with code density (x86) and after that it is converted to microcode. You wouldn't gain more than single percent if any. Process node is by far more important (5nm , 3nm, etc) and usually Apple gets access to them first. Also placing the memory in the CPU package also proved to be great for efficiency (case of point is Intel's Lunar lake that can last like forever) and last but the least is the intergraded GPU that no one seems to talk about and their respective efficiency (cause there are like 30 people in the whole world that can truly make and educated talk about them and their ISA)
tannhaeuser 1y ago
Linux desktop is a lost cause for me, simple as that with the fiasco that is Ubuntu post 2022, wayland, and too many other choices that make for a horrible user experience. Those probs with power management mentioned here are ones that systemd was supposed to solve weren't they? Only that systemd went into becoming an inner OS and can't be assed about such things. The prob as far as I'm concerned is not that Linux simply sucks, but that it used to be good (I even recommended it over Mac OS years ago here) and has regressed into a state that isn't anymore usable for me. Even using the terminal on Linux has become a pain in the ass. The priority here seems to be pack everything into containers to make further maintenance obsolete or sth? I guess if there's no one in the user seat and devs and managers have free reign over whatever grand refactoring they want to tackle that's what's happening. Back on Mac OS which has actually apps worth using, or at all.
gargan 1y ago
People need to switch to Snapdragon processors. No issues like that with Snapdragon processors, the X Elite chips is about as good as an M2 or M3 And the X Elite 2 with 18 cores will likely be announced today :D - https://www.qualcomm.com/company/events/snapdragon-summit https://www.qualcomm.com/company/events/snapdragon-summit
- svantana 1y ago
  But is it really a cpu issue? For example, the intel macs don't have that problem at all IME.
- phoronixrly 1y ago
  Thanks but no thanks. Trying to avoid qualcomm, broadcom and other open-source hostile companies.
  - gargan 1y ago
    Fair enough. There will be Ubuntu support just to let you know - https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdragon-x-elite/48800/797 https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdrag... Apparently they're working with Qualcomm to make this happen.
crabmusket 1y ago
I use a Mac M4 for work and have a Framework for myself. The M4 is a beast, but I have a different priority for a device I want to call "my own". I want more control over "my" device, and I don't demand the highest performance or battery life. I grew up on Windows, and for a long time dual-booted with various Linuxes, and eventually used WSL on the regular. But now with my Framework I'm running Fedora, so for the first time in my life I don't have to deal with Windows at all. It helps, I suppose, that I'm one of those weird types who likes to actually shut down their computer when they're not using it, instead of just closing the lid. I like a fresh start each time I open it up.
- froobius 1y ago
  > I suppose, that I'm one of those weird types who likes to actually shut down their computer when they're not using it Erm, both windows and macs can be shut down Edit: I'm getting downvoted but the way it's phrased I don't understand the issue with shutting down on macs / window. I always shut them down.
  - simiones 1y ago
    The point, I believe, was that their laptop battery lasts longer than many people's, with any OS or battery, because they shut it down much more often than most.
  - crabmusket 1y ago
    There was some discussion about Linux having trouble with battery life while hibernating. That hasn't been a problem for me because I just don't do that. In my experience, most people like to just leave their computers on, or sleep or hibernate them. Some people specifically like returning to their windows etc. just like they left them.
- dimitar 1y ago
  How quickly does your laptop start? I like this idea a lot, I am now going down the rabbithole of finding which distributions boot the fastest (I remember this mattered a lot to linux users about 20 years ago)
wdavidw 1y ago
Somehow related, there is a new firmware upgrade available this morning: Beta Software update for your Framework Laptop 16 (AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series) - BIOS 3.07. Among other things, one update states "Fixed non-functional “Force Power for Input Modules” setting".
marsknight 1y ago
I have the opposite experience. My MacBook M1 Air draws a lot of power with the lid closed, while my new Framework 12 doesn't. But I'm using Linux on both. Fedora Asahi Remix on the MB, BlendOS on the FW.
deevus 1y ago
I had to upgrade my Cloudflare plan for this!
callamdelaney 1y ago
I’ve never found the M4 on my work machine particularly impressive. Frankly I hardly use the thing because it takes far, far too long to switch between windows compared to hyprland.
ksec 1y ago
On a side note. I dont need expandable ports in laptops. But I wish I could get a thin and light, easily repairable laptop.
ktosobcy 1y ago
For me when it comes to laptop it's less about how long I can last with the battery but more about efficiency and termals - I just love that my MPB M1 is basically cool & silent for 99,9% of the time. I was on the fence a few years back when upgrading ancient MPB 2013 and in the end went with M1 instead of "PC" laptop with Linux because of that... I do hope that the recent surege of ARM laptops and MS finally embraicing it well will result in more machines like that available.
fjghajkhdfgjlk 1y ago
> But why is the battery life of modern laptops (other than Apple Silicon) so bad? But Core Ultra laptops have great battery life.
major505 1y ago
I wish framework would sell in Brazil. I can see they releasing a ARM model in the near future int order to compete with Apple. Specially because a lot of people who buy framework uses linux, and linux still have better ARM support than windows.
whalesalad 1y ago
Why has no one cracked this nut yet? I transitioned full-time to a Linux workstation in 2023 after years of driving macOS. I have an M2 air that is one of the best laptops ever made - and it really is a complete game changer when it comes to battery. I really don't think about charging it, and plug it in maybe once or twice per week. But I am longing for a slightly larger chassis and something I can run Linux on without any compromises. I was considering a Framework of all things - but this post bolsters my concern that Apple is really on a completely different level. tl;dr the age of the Linux desktop is 100% here, but we still have a lot of work to do for notebooks
budududuroiu 1y ago
I run NixOS on Framework 13. For battery life, I just shutdown fully. My system boots back up in no time. I then just restore my Firefox session and I’m 99% back to where I was when I shut down.
commandersaki 1y ago
I’m a true believer of Framework’s mission. The technology is awesome. I have contention with this; Framework technology is anything but awesome. Their laptop line is just as mediocre as most PC laptops. Mediocre build quality, mediocre display, mediocre battery, lots of annoying flaws, etc. I didn't want to copy and paste my rant about the specific issues with Framework laptop, but here is one I posted awhile back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42564335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42564335

406 points by deevus 1y ago

deevus 1y ago

Author here. I'm posting this before bed. If there are any suggestions or questions I will answer in the morning.

gclawes 1y ago
I've wanted to buy a Framework to have a linux laptop for so long, but exactly this issue of battery life is what's holding me back. As soon as Asahi supports TouchID, I think my M1 will become a linux laptop...
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  It seems to be also (still) missing support for external displays and USB-4 in general? And according to use reports battery life seems quite awful compared to macOS?
coldpie 1y ago
FWIW, I use Arch Linux with XFCE on my Intel Framework 13 and I only lose a few percent battery per day in sleep mode. I suspect you could find some software settings to make this better, maybe worth digging a bit further.
- deevus 1y ago
  What sleep modes does that support? The 7840HS only supported the "modern standby" mentioned in another comment.
  - coldpie 1y ago
    Sorry, I have no idea, it just worked this way out of the box so I never had to do any digging into it.

gjsman-1000 1y ago

> Apple Silicon is built upon ARM64 which is apparently core to such great battery life. Not really, actually. ARM isn’t terribly more efficient to decode than x86, and both are converted into micro-operations that are internal to the CPU. The real strength is Apple’s custom ARM cores; as evidenced by the failure of Qualcomm and MediaTek to make anything quite like it, even with the same manufacturing nodes.

zipy124 1y ago
I think as jeffbee said below it's not even the custom ARM cores, but rather Apple's ability to control not only the hardware but the software on-top of it. In a typical Windows machine you are dealing with your CPU and microcode made by AMD/Intel/Other, then the BIOS/Driver code written by your motherboard manufacturer, and your GPU from either the on-board, or dGPU from Intel/Nvidia/AMD and then Windows made by Microsoft. All of this leads to silly things like the ASUS ACPI driver bug [1] or Dell [2]. Apple does not suffer from this lack of control and communication, instead allowing tight integration. [1]: https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive [2]: https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-an-acpi-bug-in-my-dell-inspiron-5667-it-was-plaguing-me-for-8-years/ https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-...
- Loudergood 1y ago
  Indeed, we've seen a serious lack of care for ACPI by firmware teams on the x86 side.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
Qualcomm is getting there with the Snapdragon X Elite. It's still significantly slower than the M4 but you can at least meaningfully compare them nowadays which is a strong come back from where they were when the M1 was introduced. We are likely to see improvements now that Microsoft buys Arm chips for their Surface laptops. I guess it was hard to justify the investment before.

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jeffbee 1y ago

The ISA has nothing to do with the battery life. Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack. Framework doesn't control every level of the stack. Arguably they don't control any of it.

corndoge 1y ago
Yes, it's this. I also own an M4 mbp and an AMD framework 13. With both on maximum screen brightness, side by side, doing similar workloads, battery life isn't that much better on the M4. I think the difference maker is that the mac constantly decreases screen brightness when possible, turns the backlight completely off when there isn't any activity, heavily leverages power efficient scheduling and efficiency cores, no doubt turns off power to all peripherals whenever possible, and so on. And of course lid-closed suspend on a mac lasts indefinitely. Arch does none of these things and even on cohesive distros like Fedora there's only so much you can do in user land. Linux is designed for compatibility across a huge breadth of devices; darwin only has to support Mac hardware and can extract every ounce of power efficiency from deep hardware integration.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  IIRC the low power states of M series chips generally dips down further than most x86 CPUs do, and the way both the SoC And OS are designed are for racing to idle and coalescing tasks to reduce wakeups. On the MBPs specially the screen can also drop down to 1hz so the GPU isn’t wasting cycles redrawing static content. The result is that in more typical usage where the machine isn’t under a constant load, battery life is much better. When it’s sitting there idle displaying a web page it’s barely consuming any power at all, where most competing laptops at minimum are pulling at least 2-3x as much power between the CPU not being able to scale down that far and constantly getting woken to perform poorly scheduled tasks.
gorjusborg 1y ago
> Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack Exactly. Apple's way of doing things is about vertical integration of the stack, which is the polar opposite of how the PC market developed and largely still works. The vertical integration approach (where you control all the layers beneath the customer facing product) has the benefit of allowing you to optimize that customer experience by tweaking things anywhere in the stack. Power management in digital systems mostly comes down to being able to slow or turn off clocks when appropriate. Doing this well can be complicated, but you can tell that Apple has put a lot of energy into doing it. The downside of the vertical integration approach is that components cannot be sourced or replaced with off-the-shelf components, as the interfaces are not really standard, they are tailor made for the use case. For the Framework folks to pull off something like the M1's power sipping, they'd have to invest a lot of engineering time (a.k.a. money) and have strategic partnerships with hardware vendors and standards bodies to move the commodity chip market forward to support better power management. The thing is, one of the strengths of the Framework is that the hardware is commodity, making their devices easy to repair. Also, any work that the Framework folks do to move things forward also benefit their competitors, which can shrink the potential reward for doing so.

timpera 1y ago

I wish Framework offered a laptop with an ARM64 processor. I have a Surface Laptop 7 with a Snapdragon CPU on Windows 11 and it's been awesome so far. Insane battery life, especially in standby. I can reopen it after 48 hours and it only lost 3% of battery, while it stayed connected to WiFi and received notifications all along.

nl 1y ago
The difference here is Windows vs Linux, not ARM vs x64 (unfortunately) . Windows on Intel/AMD works just as well.
fundatus 1y ago
This! Would be an immediate buy from me.
cpursley 1y ago
My wife loves her (ancient) Surfacebook and is thinking of upgrading. Any comparability issues with the ARM chip?
- timpera 1y ago
  No issues so far, almost 1 year in, but I don't use specialized software: only web browsers, Office suite, Obsidian, Dropbox, PowerToys, FileZilla, Putty, VLC, Notepad++, WSL and random .exe utilities. I've found the emulation to be pretty good, but avoid it if you plan to do any gaming.
notnmeyer 1y ago
i also want an arm laptop running linux with good hardware. hearing it a lot too. fingers crossed.
sylens 1y ago
This is what I'm really waiting for.

cardanome 1y ago

As a Linux user I feel you. The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world (for power users) but the hardware is so, so good. For me it is about having a completely silent setup. It is so, so hard to go back to noisy fans. I really hope Asahi Linux keep going so I can have the best of both worlds.

Aurornis 1y ago
> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world I have to use Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops in my work. They all have their pros and cons, but I can’t say I’d ever argue that the Mac desktop experience is vastly inferior to the Linux desktop experience. Edit: Getting a lot of downvotes but most of the comments are about someone’s highly customized Linux desktop compared to completely vanilla Mac desktop. I’m referring to apples to apples comparison where they’re either some standard out of the box version or when customized with available tools and mods. Comparing your highly customized Linux desktop to a completely uncustomized Mac setup with no attempt at other tools or utilities isn’t an interesting comparison because it’s not apples to apples, it’s just a statement about your current preference.
- yauneyz 1y ago
  Depends how you configure it. If you like things like tiling window managers and keyboard driven computing, Linux is in a category of its own.
  - presbyterian 1y ago
    There are a dozen or more options for tiling systems and keyboard-driven computing on macOS. Personally, one of the reasons I use macOS over Linux is because I find it easier to create custom keyboard commands and shortcuts. It’s all doable on Linux, sure, but on macOS there are several apps that make it easy.
    - aeroevan 1y ago
      If you haven't used something like i3/sway/awesomewm/hyprland on the linux side you won't know what you're missing. While there are several apps to create custom keyboard commands, only yabai+skhd come close to what's available on linux, and it's not even that close tbh.

atwrk 1y ago

> I haven’t measured it but I read that I should expect it to lose 3-4% in suspend every hour. Is that a joke? That has to be a bug. I have a thinkpad with a Ryzen 7 6850U, running debian, and lose at most 3% per day.

mbreese 1y ago
As with all things, it’s all dependent upon the details. OS, Bios, chip, they all can have an impact on battery consumption while sleeping. The linked (from the post) Reddit thread has many suggestions on how to fix this, but for the author, I don’t think it was ever resolved. The author of that Reddit post was also shocked. The reason why it works well for Apple is that they control everything. There are limited numbers of parts they have to support, so they can make sure it all works. In the PC world, there are many… many variables, even from the same OEM. It’s a legitimately hard problem and manufacturers aren’t particularly motivated to get it to work better (particularly with Linux). In fact, at this moment, there’s another post on the front page that talks about this exact issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288440 . It is about debugging an ACPI bug that has existed for years.

flkiwi 1y ago

This sounds like the so-called "modern standby" (S0 vs S3, if I remember correctly). I bought a thinkpad a while back with "modern standby" and the thing wouldn't last the night suspended, and would often wake me up with its fans howling and end up being very, very hot while suspended. I disabled "modern standby" in the BIOS and it was back to sleeping for weeks without losing charge. I have no idea if that's what's going on with Framework laptops, but "modern standby" is one of the dumbest changes I've ever seen in PC hardware. To my understanding it's to make laptops behave more like phones, but I've never experienced any meaningful difference in resume behavior between S0 and S3 suspend.

Aurornis 1y ago
The standby issues with Framework laptops (at least the early ones, I don’t know about recent developments) was a well known issue. I recommended Framework to someone looking for a laptop a while ago and they were bit by the standby battery drain issue. I felt bad having recommended it to them because I assumed such a basic issue would have been addressed in a laptop that was so highly regarded.
- maverwa 1y ago
  Some of the issues have been addressed. For example, iirc, there was a bug where pulling out the power plug while the lid was closed would trigger the device to wake up. Some other issues remain. Largest I am aware of is independent from the hardware, but an issue with suspend-to-disk & kernel lockdown, which prevents deep sleep.
stephen_g 1y ago
I had* an 11th Gen Intel NUC that couldn’t sleep at all for something like a year due to EFI bugs… They finally did eventually fix the regression but really, it’s just incredible - if one company should be able to do EFI right it’s Intel! I’m not sure if this was related to “modern standby” (it was around that time if I recall) but that hasn’t really helped anything. This is a desktop so why they insist on deprecating real standby for everything is beyond me… * I actually still have it but it became my home server, so now doesn’t ever need to standby, luckily.

daviddever23box 1y ago

I've been using the Core i7-1165G7 mainboard for the 13, which works well enough with a large amount of RAM and has mature OS support.

aurareturn 1y ago

What mission do you love from Framework? Is it environmental? If so, I seriously doubt that the lifetime pollution of a Framework laptop is better than an Apple Silicon Mac. Macbooks tend to last a very long time. I used my Intel Macbook Air for 10 years. After that, I sold it and maybe it continued to get used by the second owner. While you can keep upgrading Framework laptops (parts require shipping/pollution to manufacture), I doubt it'll last a decade or someone wants to upgrade it for a decade to keep up. Apple also has recycling programs and it seems to do quite well when it comes to using recycled materials. I doubt Framework is big enough to do these things as well as Apple. Framework laptops are often more than doubled the price of similar spec'ed Windows laptops. They're also quite a bit more expensive than Apple laptops in the same class. Framework is one of those things that is great for virtue signaling but doesn't make sense in real life. Edit: You can buy an M4 Air for $799 on sale frequently.[0] Meanwhile, a similar spec'ed Framework with a slower AMD CPU/GPU is $1,517.00.[1] So the repairability angle just doesn't seem worth it. If the Air breaks, just buy a new one. Keep in mind that the M4 Air has a better display, significantly faster CPU, faster GPU, significantly more battery life, is fanless, better speakers, much better trackpad, and a thinner profile. [0]https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/27/200-off-every-m4-macbook-air/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/27/200-off-every-m4-macboo... [1]https://frame.work/products/laptop13-diy-amd-ai300/configuration/new https://frame.work/products/laptop13-diy-amd-ai300/configura...

deevus 1y ago
For me it's the repairable nature. Prior to the Framework 13 I had a bunch of Thinkpads until the enshittification by Lenovo in recent years.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  How often have you needed to repair a MacBook? The enhanced repairability is basically insurance in case of a fault. Compared to a MacBook, or insurance for a MacBook, this insurance is overpriced. As for the environment, the power consumption + larger design with extra parts to make it repairable + how few people ever buy parts makes this a virtue signaling wash.

b3lvedere 1y ago

I guess it's a bit on how various technologies are optimized within the system. My Steam Deck can hold quite some battery juice for a while, but i will never be more amazed than my original Nintendo DS, that still has lots of battery capacity even after years and years of neglect. For my current laptops i have been ignoring the battery completely. I rather have max performance, so every energy saving thing gets disabled. Most of the time it's connected to power anyway.

maverwa 1y ago

The complaint about power usage in suspend is especially sad because it’s pretty much a common problem for Linux on laptops. Not sure if that’s what applies here, but the numbers about match what I see with my Framework. Basically: if you want to use secure boot you usually also want kernel lockdown mode, and you cannot hibernate a lockdowned kernel. At least not without out-of-tree patches. IMHO that’s a giant issue. If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low. And telling people to not run secure boot or lockdown is not really a good answer either. Especially since the default installer already sets those things up. I get that „Linux on laptops“ is not a priority big enough to get a proper fix for that. And that it’s not an easy issue to fix. But the current state is really really sad.

jeffbee 1y ago
> If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low. This is cope. An Apple Silicon Macbook does not need to suspend to block devices to save energy (they only do this when the battery is empty). ChromeOS doesn't offer hibernate at all. The only reason that a Framework can't have good battery life in an operating state is that nobody is paying attention to the details.
- N-Krause 1y ago
  And what are those details? Sounds like you know specifics that I'd like to also know. If you're claiming it is just an oversight, then please back it up.
  - nagisa 1y ago
    While I don't have any suggestions on how to look at the relevant metrics, a big part of the issue is the parts selection and having them power off properly. 1%/h is just 0.5W (for a 50Wh battery) which isn't a lot, but fail to bring a component or two to shutdown or sufficiently low power state and you'll observe exactly this behaviour. Of course some drain is going to be almost inevitable just to keep memory contents sufficiently refreshed, but with proper power-saving states memory can go appreciably below 0.5W.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

As suggested in the blog post, the battery life issue is complex. You do need a CPU/SoC that’s efficient, and while Intel and AMD can do this it’s traditionally been a struggle for them. Next, the OS needs to be capable of taking full advantage of the chip’s efficiency. Windows could be decent here in, but Microsoft doesn’t believe in an operating system that’s ever truly idle (and neither do the third parties living in your taskbar tray), so even on relatively efficient laptops much of that potential is wasted. Linux is kind of all over the place, depending on your hardware, which governor you’re using, how it’s configured, whether your browsers are configured to use GPU acceleration or are burning power intensive CPU cycles, etc. Then there’s sleep. Most of the problems here come down to x86 laptops not implementing proper S3 sleep but only “modern standby”, which attempts to emulate the sleep mode that Apple uses that allows for emails to be fetched etc while in a near-sleep low-power state. The problem is that modern standby is not implemented well in Windows or Linux and how individual laptop firmwares handle it can vary a great deal, and the sum of it is that it generally speaking doesn’t work, which is why so many x86 laptops drain themselves after being “asleep” for a couple of days. My ThinkPad does this too. It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more. This seems to require a level of integration between the hardware and the OS (an Arch based Linux in this case) than practically all laptop vendors are either willing or capable of.

BirAdam 1y ago
Excellent point with Steam Deck. The machine is proof that x86 and Linux can do it and simply don’t.
- dpoloncsak 1y ago
  While proof, I think it also highlights the root cause of the issue. Linux is developed to be compatible with different hardware setups. SteamOS and MacOS are both (supposed to be) locked to their respective hardware. It works on that hardware, but ymmv on anything else.
  - 1y ago

pclmulqdq 1y ago

The Arm architecture isn't why Apple Silicon is so good at this. Apple's silicon engineers have been very good at designing a system of power states that is extremely efficient, and have tight coupling with the OS. Linux on a framework laptop gives you none of this co-design.

apozem 1y ago
Exactly - Apple hardware is designed for its software, and vice versa. They get battery gains across the stack. I remember when the M1 Macs first came out, an Apple engineer revealed they'd optimized the hardware so one specific low-level operation macOS does all the time was 5x faster than on Intel [0]. [0]: https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/the_m1_macs https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/the_m1_macs
- AceJohnny2 1y ago
  > Apple hardware is designed for its software, and vice versa Sometimes I find it hard to believe that Apple Silicon implements 2 different togglable memory models, just so that Rosetta can better emulate x86 https://www.sra.uni-hannover.de/Publications/2024/wrenger_24_jsa.pdf https://www.sra.uni-hannover.de/Publications/2024/wrenger_24...
- simonask 1y ago
  It’s not even a particularly obscure low-level operation: atomic add. Every computer in the world performs that exact instruction a huge number of times running normal, non-Apple software. The key insight is the kind of “vertical integration” providing the kind of feedback loop to spot the opportunity.

jasoneckert 1y ago

The same points made about battery life with Apple Silicon in this blog post equally apply to Snapdragon Elite X laptops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMTJm3vmh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMTJm3vmh0

whatarethembits 1y ago

Battery life is the only thing stopping me from getting out of the Apple ecosystem. As soon as a viable Linux laptop with "enough" battery life becomes available, I'll make the switch. At that point there's nothing on Apple side that couldn't be done better in Linux (with a bit of work, but that's okay). I travel a lot, and often on standby for work during that time. I need to be confident that when I pull the laptop out, there's ALWAYS enough juice to respond to a situation immediately without worrying about anything else. If Framework offered hot swappable batteries, even if a quick restart is required, I'd be fine with that because at least I wouldn't be stranded in that case. And I'd be happy to pay as much as a MacBook, or a bit more even, purely for ideological reasons. Apple's dominance is bad for all of us.

bo1024 1y ago
I think you could shut down a framework, swap the battery, and boot back up in probably 3 minutes or maybe only 1.
- dhosek 1y ago
  My first Apple laptop, a Titanium PowerBook, you could sleep the machine and swap the battery and not have to reboot.
- adolph 1y ago
  > swap the battery I count 14, 8 and 5 screws to swap the battery: https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery/425 https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery/425 https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery+Replacement+Guide/85?lang=en https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery+Replacement+Guide/85... https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery/278?lang=en https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery/278?lang=en
sedatk 1y ago
Windows ARM laptops are quite good in that regard, but I'm not sure how close they're to Macs.
eigenspace 1y ago
Instead of a hot-swappable battery, why not just carry a large battery-bank that can charge your laptop over USB-C? That way you don't even need to reboot. Browsing around on Amazon, I see there's actually quite a few battery banks that with over 60W of output, and ~100Wh of capacity for under 100€

pjmlp 1y ago

My Thinkpad P15 battery was also great after two weeks vacation, with Windows 11 Professional, and Intel CPU.

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bigpeopleareold 1y ago

"I still love my Framework, despite its flaws. I will just keep it plugged in so that it’s ready to go when I want to use it." That sounds like a plan! I suppose that if I was distant from an outlet for a long enough time, the battery life would be great, but I'm rarely if ever. It's nice not to be tethered to a wire, but it's not bad really overall.

jon9544hn 1y ago

Reminds me of the windows laptop-closed-but-loses-power-while-hibernating bug that’s been around for ages (10+ years at minimum). Linus (LTT) has made multiple video regarding that over the years. Obviously, that’s windows. But I do wonder why sleep modes in Linux/windows don’t actually work effectively. I mean they ‘work’ as in slowed battery drain, but still nowhere near any of the MacBook series (with/without the M* chips). Idk something about them, they get it right..

_1tem 1y ago

The difference is fundamental. A product where the hardware and software is built by the same entity will always work better in the long run. It all comes down to decades of iteration and low-level optimizations that aren't easy to do any other way. This is why you'll pry my Apple devices from my cold, dead hands. Even if a super magical alternative device manufacturer with the perfect open source OS appeared tomorrow they wouldn't be able to replicate the decades of compounding interest that have been invested into the Apple ecosystem. The value of that compound interest far outweighs any other concerns I might have about Apple devices, such as "lock in" or declining software quality (valid concerns, still worth bearing the cost). Apple devices are objectively and measurably better not just on metrics like battery life. Linux nerds like DHH and his heroic Omarchy effort are simply wasting their time because they hate Apple.

g8oz 1y ago

I have heard anecdotally that the Snapdragon arm window laptops have amazing battery life. I'd be interested in hearing from people who have used these as well as the Mx MacBooks.

999900000999 1y ago

I want to love framework, and I really do want to get behind their mission, but a few things stand out. First and this is the elephant in the room, it's probably better for the environment to buy a refurbished think pad. The most environmentally friendly product is one that gets reused instead of going to a landfill. The 13-in framework only offers one SSD slot, The expansion Bay offers a nice storage option but these are a bit overpriced and then you're down to three ports. The design itself feels really prone to failure, if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail which seems like a really weird design choice. It probably would have been smarter to do something that requires actually screwing in components. To get comparable specs, you seriously need to spend about 50% more on average, and this is just me comparing ThinkPads to Frameworks. If I wanted to look at laptops on sale you can easily find framework specs at half price. Finally the support issues don't really inspire confidence, if my Lenovo laptop has issues I can walk into a variety of authorized repair centers and just let them sort it out. Framework simply doesn't have this, I don't have the appetite to pay a premium price and not have this as an option. Extended warranty options are iffy. You have to first pay more for the prebuilt laptop, and then at the performance tier ( Amd 350) you have to drop $1,690 to get a 3 year warranty. It's out of stock anyway. The Lenovo E14 Gen 7 with a Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 255H Processor is about 1030$ direct from Lenovo with a 3 year warranty (2 years is available, and is my risk tolerance sweet spot, so I can save 60$ there). The only reason I'm looking at the E14 is I REALLY want two SSD drives. If I'm ok with just one I can buy a refurbished P14 for around 780$. I think the core issue is Framework is still a boutique brand, if they ever reach the size of a major OEM then they're pricing will be more competitive.

Zak 1y ago
> if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail If you're plugging and unplugging USB-C cables all the time, eventually the ports are going to fail, but we generally consider plugging things into USB-C acceptable. The Framework expansion modules are just USB-C ports, but they're not subject to much twisting or bending when using the modules so they should last longer.
- 1y ago

sharpshadow 1y ago

The standby experience is so bad on Linux laptops that I almost always shutdown and optimise for boot speed. On the MB a shutdown is quite rare and getting into the system takes 1s with the fingerprint reader. That’s such a huge difference it feels like magic.

j1mc 1y ago
I've mentioned it elsewhere in this thread, but installing TLP makes a huge difference for suspend on Linux laptops. https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html

impure-aqua 1y ago

I don't think Framework will be able to compete on efficiency with their design philosophy. The NVMe disk is swappable, which means it has its own controller which manages power management itself. I did my research to pick an efficient SSD and ended up with a Lexar NM790. It tops Tom's efficiency charts and comes in third place for lowest idle power consumption [0]. This is still ~0.8W at idle. On a 60Wh battery an idling drive alone will kill the battery in 3 days. Now technically there is the APST (Autonomous Power State Transition) feature in the NVMe specification. Is there some lower APST power state that can get the power draw down? Potentially, but that is a feature well beyond the purview of any SSD reviews I have seen, so I don't know- does this drive have reliable and well-implemented APST state support? How does this interact with the platform-specific sleep state implementation, which presumably wakes the disk sometimes to do some Modern Standby features- how often is it spending time in that 0.8W state versus lower? This can vary between board rev or BIOS version certainly. Beyond the actual drive configuration and ACPI interaction, there is also kernel interaction. Do certain drives behave poorly with Linux? Etc etc. On the RAM side of things, they are using DDR5 and not LPDDR5. There is a lower voltage on LPPDR5 which is a constant inefficiency, but also LPDDR5 has dynamic voltage scaling and dynamic frequency scaling. There is also technically some voltage drop across the SODIMM connector which you don't need to contend with when you solder RAM, which would be a constant source of loss, but I am not sure how significant that is. Beyond this you have different behaviour for every model of RAM. This post on the Framework forum shows the user could get 7.82 days of suspend time with the HMCG66MEBSA092N DDR5-4800MHz 16GB kit whereas only 2.25 days with the CT2K48G56C46S5 DDR5-5600MHz 96GB kit [1]. Consider that there are effectively infinite combinations of memory people can run, and even inside a model series, vendors can swap their chip providers, etc. Which kits give the best battery endurance? I can't tell you. Now someone could certainly embark on a long adventure to test different drives, RAM kits, and measure their performance, recommend tunables for the Linux kernel you want to set for each particular set of hardware, etc. But this is effectively what Apple is doing for you with the MacBook. They are choosing their memory supplier, their flash supplier, and integrating as much as possible into their SoC with presumably an entire team focused on extracting the most efficient behaviour out of both. Consider this same thing extends to display behaviour (beyond VRR support, which I believe Framework has now, you also have local dimming behaviour to tune on the MBP), wireless behaviour, all sorts of embedded controllers that Apple can wrap inside the SoC that I probably wouldn't think of... I don't see how a modular system like Framework can achieve anything close to the idle efficiency of a MacBook. [0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/lexar-nm790-ssd-review/2 https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/lexar-nm790-ssd-review/... [1] https://community.frame.work/t/impact-of-ram-density-on-suspend-power-consumption/57664 https://community.frame.work/t/impact-of-ram-density-on-susp...

TYPE_FASTER 1y ago

I think Apple's success at using power management data from their mobile products to make computer hardware with really good power management is highlighting just how bad computer power management has been. When you close the lid on a laptop, there are a lot of layers that all have to do the right thing. How is Windows configured? How do the drivers installed on that laptop handle the Windows state transitions? How do all the pieces of hardware on that laptop (CPU, etc.) work together to implement the various states? I think it is possible for a computer manufacturer like Framework to work with operating system vendors like Microsoft and Canonical, and hardware vendors like Intel and AMD to improve how power management is implemented in their hardware. There is always some level of "friction" involved when you are trying to integrate across different vendors. Some of the best Windows hardware I've used was made by Microsoft. The Surface line, at least in my experience, is really good. It will require an investment of course, but I think it is possible.

thebitstick 1y ago

This will never happen, but the ideal laptop for me would be a Framework Laptop 13/16 with an Apple Silicon mainboard and OLED display. The soldered RAM of the Framework Desktop has already opened the door to soldered RAM on Framework Laptop mainboards.

seabrookmx 1y ago

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.

mrbonner 1y ago
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.
- throwaway240403 1y ago
  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.
  - LTL_FTC 1y ago
    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 https://github.com/apple/container

dangus 1y ago

As someone who moved from an MacBook Pro I share the pain, but I also made the following adjustments: 1. I just shut down the computer fully more often. It’s annoying so I don’t always do it, but I’ll do it if I know I’m not using the computer as much. 2. I carry a 98Wh battery pack with me. If my laptop is fully dead it’s not a big deal because a full battery pack charges it all the way up, or if both are full it extends the battery life to be MacBook level. Since the framework is lighter than my Mac was anyway it’s not such a big deal.

hk1337 1y ago

I love the Framework hardware but not all that impressed with the choice of operating systems that are available. That’s not really Framework’s problem though.

AgentElement 1y ago
There is a choice of operating systems, which cannot be said about macs.
noisy_boy 1y ago
What does that mean? I thought they offer Windows and Linux options? If you are referring to distros of the latter, you can install whichever you like, no?
- hk1337 1y ago
  Yes, you can even bring your own, the problem isn't with Framework in my case.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

Same issue I've had - the issue is specifically for Linux (Win on Framework doesn't suffer from this). One thing I found was certain modules like USB-A or HDMI drawing power even when suspended.

wmf 1y ago

I wonder if this is just the S0ix problem.

victor9000 1y ago

The best thing about owning a framework is that you can easily recover from silly events like spilling an entire latte on your laptop. I've done this twice so far and both times it cost me $99 to swap out the keyboard and get back to a stock look and feel.

samtheDamned 1y ago
I just got a framework 12 and the first day I set it up a latte spilled all over it and thankfully the keyboard survived but the peace of mind that, even if it wasn't, a replacement keyboard is $50 was/is so valuable.
manmal 1y ago
Or you could get a Mighty Mug or similar one that doesn’t spill.

jadenPete 1y ago

I really, really want an ARM laptop with great Linux support. It's very difficult to justify buying an non-M series laptop today, when the M series laptops outperform x86 laptops in battery life by such a wide margin. I'm sure some of that is because Apple controls their entire hardware and software stack and can optimize macOS for battery life, but it's hard not to believe that the processor architecture (i.e. x86) is mostly to blame for the terrible battery life of most laptops.

babypuncher 1y ago
I think it's still up in the air whether a decent non-Apple laptop/desktop class ARM chip will come to market before Intel and/or AMD narrow the efficiency gap enough that the hassle won't be worth it.
- OJFord 1y ago
  Who would make it? Do the likes of Broadcom have the vision & ambition to push into that class? I could see it happening if AMD decided Arm was the way to progress, but that would be bold too. (AMD does already have an architecture licence though I believe.)
AuthAuth 1y ago
The M Series doesn't get battery life rep due to it being arm its purely due to Apple optimizing for battery life and partly marketing it a ton. You can get x86 chips that can do 24HR playing a video which is 5 hours more than the M2/M3 laptops and keep in mind thats running bloated ass windows which probably uses 2-3x the system resources of macOS. I'm pretty sure the snapdragon chips out preform Apple silicon at almost every metric.
- pier25 1y ago
  > I'm pretty sure the snapdragon chips out preform Apple silicon at almost every metric. No, not even close. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-15-M4-review-The-fanless-M4-SoC-is-years-ahead-of-the-competition.976933.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-15-M4-review...

dreamcompiler 1y ago

TFA suggests ARM64 might be the answer. It's not that simple. Asahi Linux on Apple silicon still uses substantial energy when the lid is closed, compared to MacOS on the same hardware. With Asahi you might get a couple of days of sleep before the battery dies but you definitely won't get a month.

teekert 1y ago
That might be down to the weirdness of (or Linux's unfamiliarity with) Apple silicon, not ARM in general.

fidotron 1y ago

This isn't just a question of direct power management features or use of custom silicon, but there has been curious noise for years out of Apple over a major cause: memory management. In modern systems memory becomes a major source of power consumption, so reducing how much if it you need to keep active results in big gains, on top of all the other benefits of doing this. This is partly used as the reasoning to explain why Swift has evolved in the direction it has, but also various apps that suspend/resume their state at a higher level than simply relying on the OS to do it. It would take a gargantuan effort, which would likely annoy almost everyone, to get a desktop Linux distro to do this.

macintux 1y ago
I believe that's also why Apple has been conservative with the amount of RAM in their phones.
saagarjha 1y ago
I don't think Apple does anything particularly special with memory management as it relates to power.

cantalopes 1y ago

I have also noticed that when i'm dual booting to windows i get way more battery life than on manjaro with gnome, closed lid or active work. I guess it's much easier to oeganize battery optimizations in one house unfortunately

shirro 1y ago

I don't remember having "range anxiety" under S3 suspend on my old intel laptops. It just worked and they woke up reasonably reliably and quickly under linux if you had a regular thin and light with integrated graphics. I had an Apple intel laptop that might have been marginally faster returning to life but it basically just worked on either. The move to modern standby has been a mess. It seems to have improved a lot but my kid always shuts down his windows laptop before putting it in a bag because it seems to have become urban folklore that laptops turn on in bags, overheat and get damaged. That is new. I carried laptops in bags suspended for years and nobody thought that. It just worked.

_kulang 1y ago
I’ve certainly had that particularly with older Dell XPS computers. So has Linus at LTT, which I suppose how it entered folklore. I say this as my lab mate had his laptop do exactly that just last week, with up to date windows and a newer XPS laptop. It simply has never happened to my Macs
notpushkin 1y ago
Modern standby is a disaster.
WillPostForFood 1y ago
I think it is more lived experience than urban folklore - it definitely happens.
- dwayne_dibley 1y ago
  can confirm, my MS Surface did it all the time, something about shutting the lid before removing the power supply. I can't recall now, but it was the thing that make me switch back to apple.
mips_avatar 1y ago
As someone whose job was to improve Windows fundamentals this makes me really sad. I worked on making Windows respect modern standby better, and there just wasn't a whole lot of interest in making it work. The whole OS needs a lot of considered improvement, and it's not getting it.

Havoc 1y ago

Are people away from power sources that often? Don’t think I’ve thought about battery level on my work (windows) laptop once. Home, office, conference rooms - everything has usb C docks

QuercusMax 1y ago
When I used to commute via company bus in the bay area, it mattered to me; also when I'm using my laptop out and about in the city, I'd prefer not to have to worry about finding a seat with a charger. Of course, nowadays power banks are getting so cheap and lightweight, I just toss a couple in my bag, and don't really worry about it. I just ordered one of the Haribo power banks all the backpackers are raving about.
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bigstrat2003 1y ago
Yeah this seems like a complete non-issue to me. A laptop doesn't need to run all day on battery; if you are working any length of time you're going to be near an AC outlet at some point.

koinedad 1y ago

It’s hard when you’ve had such amazing hardware. I’m still intrigued by framework myself and hope to get one in the near future!

dash2 1y ago

I quit Linux around 2010 and got a MacBook Air, partly because suspend/resume kept breaking. So pleased to know that 15 years later, it still doesn’t work. Proprietary hardware and software for the win.

dvrp 1y ago

Someday I’ll be able to go back to Linux. In the meantime, Return of the Mac.

LTL_FTC 1y ago
That’s a fun song

MisterTea 1y ago

Funny side story is years ago when AMD was developing the Opteron A series I commented somewhere that AMD is making a terrible blunder and is going after the wrong market. They needed to start the other way around, and build a kick ass Arm + GPU SoC that was more akin to a PC in terms of performance and not a throw away raspberry pi SoC. Bigger caches, wider memory bus, PCIe e.g. for NVMe, powerful GPU. Essentially something general purpose that could power a mid range laptop/work PC/Desktop/Embedded but designed to be cost effective and crazy power efficient. "There is totally a market for it." I said. People responded along the lines of "And what is going to run on that?" And they were right. At the time there would have been no killer app, not even Linux could propel it IMO. Of course Apple has the ability to steer their entire ship just like they steered from PowerPC to x86-64. So kudos to them for proving I was right ;-) Though I still want my AMD Arm GPU SoC...

mschuster91 1y ago
For that, you'd actually need a high performance ARM core on one side (and frankly, it's just Apple at that point, they needed well over a decade to get there), and you need some way to make legacy x86/x86_64 applications to run smoothly to get over the chicken-egg effect, and you need some way for all the legacy hardware devices that people plug in into their computers. Apple could do it not just because of their experience from the iOS device family and the IP they acquired for it, but because they didn't need to take care that much about the issues in the Windows ecosystem. Apple has long since discouraged third party hardware that can't be driven with libusb from userspace as kexts have been deprecated, Apple has been pretty ruthless in forcing developers to keep their software compileable, and their ARM Architecture License allowed them to do tweaks and extensions to make performant emulation of x86 code possible.
- MisterTea 1y ago
  Well the architectural backwards compatibility issues are Apple's problem really. I was thinking of a pure Arm machine running Linux/BSD/9.
  - 1y ago

ChaoPrayaWave 1y ago

I've been on Linux for over a decade, and honestly, getting lured into fixing things has become second nature.

j45 1y ago

I wish I didn't have to optimize the Framework battery myself. Buying an SSD and RAM that uses less power when idling helped, a handful of settings helped, but then I realized, this laptop is near perfect, and it stands out even more that I have to compensate for lack of a power management setup out of the box. It was early for Framework though, and it otherwise ran flawlessly. I hope battery power management can be a first class citizen on Framework one day soon. The rest is so solid and I wish Framework sustainability for a long, long time. For now, I need my laptop to be invisible so I can do what I need.

webdevver 1y ago

we need to do to UEFI what Stalin did to the intellectual classes

dustbunny 1y ago

Is this person using deep sleep? I always make sure I'm on deep sleep. I know it's gross: Put this in a file: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="mem_sleep_default=deep In /etc/default/grub.d/90_memsleepdefault.cfg Then run update-grub And reboot. Run this to check if deep sleep is enabled: cat /sys/power/mem_sleep If it says [deep] your good

deevus 1y ago
I will try this. Thank you
ritcgab 1y ago
This is "obsolete" S3 sleep. Newer CPUs don't support this.

farmin 1y ago

Can someone tell me if hibernate works on the kubuntu Focus IR14. I love kubuntu but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere really don’t like inability for my thinkpad to hibernate without losing charge. I’d buy a Linux first machine if I knew it would just work.

diego_sandoval 1y ago

I've never had this issue, because I simply power off my laptop when I'm not using it. Am I the only one?

osigurdson 1y ago

When I switch my Thinkpad X1 to Arch, I was expecting a massive battery life downgrade. However, it lasts at least as long as Windows or possibly longer.

sandGorgon 1y ago

you folks should really try the lenovo yoga series. especially this year's yoga slim aura edition (which has the intel lunar lake chips). The ipex-llm extensions are fairly stable and work very well ( https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-pytorch https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-pytorch ) and the build quality of the laptop is exactly like the macbook air - i have both.

yoavm 1y ago
The discussion is mostly around battery life. How's the battery life on your Yoga, how much power does it lose on standby, and what operating system do you use?
- sandGorgon 1y ago
  windows. all day battery life. holds up pretty well to the macbook air 15 at similar workloads. macbook does get 1-1.5 hour more battery life. The lunar lake is an insane chip.

pachico 1y ago

I am forced to use a MacBook M4 at work but I have and love my Framework 13 Intel. Battery management is superior in MacOS but I can leave my Framework suspended for more than at least a week (I never measured how long it can stay like this). I run vanilla Ubuntu with TLP, though, which might be the trick.

vocoda 1y ago
What’s TLP?
- yoavm 1y ago
  https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html
j1mc 1y ago
TLP is definitely the trick. TLP makes a huge difference in improving battery life while on suspend in Linux - especially since laptop makers stopped supporting S3 sleep.

captainregex 1y ago

It’s crazy you have to go like four comments deep and into the sub convo before you find mention of windows on arm- apple silicon is just so dominant in the zeitgeist for people who think about this stuff

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
If there were a Windows on ARM laptop that blew peoples' socks off (the way the M1 MacBooks did initially), it'd make waves but that has yet to happen. The initial round of Snapdragon laptops had battery life that was better than what Intel/AMD machines were capable of, but not quite MacBook level and performance wasn't quite there either. Then Intel's Lunar Lake came out and was about as good or better with none of the compatibility problems, basically stealing Qualcomm's thunder.

nurettin 1y ago

> had a short stint with Arch Linux. It wasn’t stable enough It is all fun and games until they break libc on the next update.

vander_elst 1y ago

Honest question, how is it possible that Macs are so much better in terms of hardware? Context: I use a MacBook at work and a Lenovo with Linux at home and now I might need to change my personal laptop, but I struggle to find (hardware) reasons why not to buy a MacBook, a MacBook Air is actually cheaper than another laptops with similar specs. There's still the ideology of repairability and openness which still plays a big role for me, but from a hardware perspective I see a clear winner. How is it possible that no other manufacturer can come close to the apple offering? There are big players (Lenovo, Dell, HP etc...) that I would have thought they would have the capabilities for producing similar products, why do they lag so far behind?

dijit 1y ago
CPUs are the main reason. They’re about 1-1.5 generations ahead of AMDs mobile offering, and OEMs have sweetheart deals with Intel, which is more like 4-5 generations behind. So flagship business laptops (which are the only comparable laptops in terms of build quality to Macbooks) are hamstrung, and everything else is built like a matchbox even with AMD cpus.
- mmcnl 1y ago
  It's everything else where MacBooks excel too. The build quality is insane, I've never seen a laptop with as little flex as a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The keyboards are now finally great, and the display is amazing as well. Trackpad is best in class too. Another thing: the displays are glossy, but still not very reflective. The Windows laptops glossy displays are so much more reflective, they are unusable outside. Also something worth mentioning, the MacBook displays get really bright. A high-end OLED display hardly goes above 400 nits. A MacBook Pro can go to 600 nits and outside it goes to 1600 nits. This is the difference between being able to use a laptop outside, and not. Durability: if you're not doing anything crazy the MacBook will look brand new even after years of usage. Notable exception is the cheap plastic key caps which degrade very quickly, a bummer. So the MacBooks beat the competition easily from a hardware quality perspective, and we haven't even talked about the elephant in the room yet: CPU performance, battery life and fan noise, obviously Apple is even further ahead in this area. And then price, as strange as it sounds, both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are cheaper than the competition. Disclaimer: I don't own a MacBook personally because I think macOS is not great, but that's probably the only reason why I'm not buying a MacBook. I would happily pay same the price of a MacBook Pro for a similar Windows laptop if it existed. It does not. There are always compromises.

darkamaul 1y ago

I recently made the move from a Framework to a M4. And god that’s so convenient to simply be able to close or open the lid to instantly use the laptop. On the Framework, I had to get it plugged before I could turn it on, due to a problem with the RTC battery [0]. There is actually a known defect here but they provide a free replacement _and_ a guide to help you perform the swap [1]. [0] https://community.frame.work/t/viability-of-an-ml-1220-rechargable-battery-for-rtc-cmos-11th-gen/17664/43 https://community.frame.work/t/viability-of-an-ml-1220-recha... [1] https://knowledgebase.frame.work/fr/how-do-i-replace-the-rtc-battery-in-my-framework-laptop-Hk406Lc1t https://knowledgebase.frame.work/fr/how-do-i-replace-the-rtc...

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jakelindsay 1y ago

you just cant beat apple silicon battery life

whatever1 1y ago

I keep reading the argument that x86 laptops have horrible battery life & sleep draining issues because of the laptop OEM incompetence. If that is the case then why the snapdragon CPU laptops don’t face these issues?

camillomiller 1y ago

Imagine someone saying the same (“it’s awful and doesn’t really actually work but I want to love it”) about anything else than Linux or FOSS and you’ll be privy to an outside perspective on a very peculiar form of nerd delusion.

teekert 1y ago

It's a shame indeed. I've been a long, long time Linux user and just trained myself to always power off (although I feel that in the old days this was less of an issue? Can that be? Just install ACPI-tools or something?), feels more tidy anyway. But yeah that's what it does to you to always grab a laptop that either has 0 battery or is cooking, from a backpack. On the other hand, yesterday my sons Windows Laptop (we keep an open mind in this family + school requires it) was also cooking in his backpack so there is that... How are System76 laptops in this regards? You'd think somehow because of the hardware control they should have this down? At least when sticking to Po#@Po!s!. Ah well, you can see that the money is on the server part when it comes to Linux ;)

yonisto 1y ago

I'm using Framework with Windows and AMD and I have excellent hibernate/sleep time... It is really a Linux thing. I remember a post on reddit that claims that the Bluefin distribution has excellent battery life. It amazes me how the legend of ARM being more efficient than x86 took hold. I'm not saying that we don't have a more efficient ARM processors BUT it has nothing to do with the ISA. What you gain with a simple encoder (ARM) you gain with code density (x86) and after that it is converted to microcode. You wouldn't gain more than single percent if any. Process node is by far more important (5nm , 3nm, etc) and usually Apple gets access to them first. Also placing the memory in the CPU package also proved to be great for efficiency (case of point is Intel's Lunar lake that can last like forever) and last but the least is the intergraded GPU that no one seems to talk about and their respective efficiency (cause there are like 30 people in the whole world that can truly make and educated talk about them and their ISA)

tannhaeuser 1y ago

Linux desktop is a lost cause for me, simple as that with the fiasco that is Ubuntu post 2022, wayland, and too many other choices that make for a horrible user experience. Those probs with power management mentioned here are ones that systemd was supposed to solve weren't they? Only that systemd went into becoming an inner OS and can't be assed about such things. The prob as far as I'm concerned is not that Linux simply sucks, but that it used to be good (I even recommended it over Mac OS years ago here) and has regressed into a state that isn't anymore usable for me. Even using the terminal on Linux has become a pain in the ass. The priority here seems to be pack everything into containers to make further maintenance obsolete or sth? I guess if there's no one in the user seat and devs and managers have free reign over whatever grand refactoring they want to tackle that's what's happening. Back on Mac OS which has actually apps worth using, or at all.

gargan 1y ago

People need to switch to Snapdragon processors. No issues like that with Snapdragon processors, the X Elite chips is about as good as an M2 or M3 And the X Elite 2 with 18 cores will likely be announced today :D - https://www.qualcomm.com/company/events/snapdragon-summit https://www.qualcomm.com/company/events/snapdragon-summit

svantana 1y ago
But is it really a cpu issue? For example, the intel macs don't have that problem at all IME.
phoronixrly 1y ago
Thanks but no thanks. Trying to avoid qualcomm, broadcom and other open-source hostile companies.
- gargan 1y ago
  Fair enough. There will be Ubuntu support just to let you know - https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdragon-x-elite/48800/797 https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdrag... Apparently they're working with Qualcomm to make this happen.

crabmusket 1y ago

I use a Mac M4 for work and have a Framework for myself. The M4 is a beast, but I have a different priority for a device I want to call "my own". I want more control over "my" device, and I don't demand the highest performance or battery life. I grew up on Windows, and for a long time dual-booted with various Linuxes, and eventually used WSL on the regular. But now with my Framework I'm running Fedora, so for the first time in my life I don't have to deal with Windows at all. It helps, I suppose, that I'm one of those weird types who likes to actually shut down their computer when they're not using it, instead of just closing the lid. I like a fresh start each time I open it up.

froobius 1y ago
> I suppose, that I'm one of those weird types who likes to actually shut down their computer when they're not using it Erm, both windows and macs can be shut down Edit: I'm getting downvoted but the way it's phrased I don't understand the issue with shutting down on macs / window. I always shut them down.
- simiones 1y ago
  The point, I believe, was that their laptop battery lasts longer than many people's, with any OS or battery, because they shut it down much more often than most.
- crabmusket 1y ago
  There was some discussion about Linux having trouble with battery life while hibernating. That hasn't been a problem for me because I just don't do that. In my experience, most people like to just leave their computers on, or sleep or hibernate them. Some people specifically like returning to their windows etc. just like they left them.
dimitar 1y ago
How quickly does your laptop start? I like this idea a lot, I am now going down the rabbithole of finding which distributions boot the fastest (I remember this mattered a lot to linux users about 20 years ago)

wdavidw 1y ago

Somehow related, there is a new firmware upgrade available this morning: Beta Software update for your Framework Laptop 16 (AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series) - BIOS 3.07. Among other things, one update states "Fixed non-functional “Force Power for Input Modules” setting".

marsknight 1y ago

I have the opposite experience. My MacBook M1 Air draws a lot of power with the lid closed, while my new Framework 12 doesn't. But I'm using Linux on both. Fedora Asahi Remix on the MB, BlendOS on the FW.

deevus 1y ago

I had to upgrade my Cloudflare plan for this!

callamdelaney 1y ago

I’ve never found the M4 on my work machine particularly impressive. Frankly I hardly use the thing because it takes far, far too long to switch between windows compared to hyprland.

ksec 1y ago

On a side note. I dont need expandable ports in laptops. But I wish I could get a thin and light, easily repairable laptop.

ktosobcy 1y ago

For me when it comes to laptop it's less about how long I can last with the battery but more about efficiency and termals - I just love that my MPB M1 is basically cool & silent for 99,9% of the time. I was on the fence a few years back when upgrading ancient MPB 2013 and in the end went with M1 instead of "PC" laptop with Linux because of that... I do hope that the recent surege of ARM laptops and MS finally embraicing it well will result in more machines like that available.

fjghajkhdfgjlk 1y ago

> But why is the battery life of modern laptops (other than Apple Silicon) so bad? But Core Ultra laptops have great battery life.

major505 1y ago

I wish framework would sell in Brazil. I can see they releasing a ARM model in the near future int order to compete with Apple. Specially because a lot of people who buy framework uses linux, and linux still have better ARM support than windows.

whalesalad 1y ago

Why has no one cracked this nut yet? I transitioned full-time to a Linux workstation in 2023 after years of driving macOS. I have an M2 air that is one of the best laptops ever made - and it really is a complete game changer when it comes to battery. I really don't think about charging it, and plug it in maybe once or twice per week. But I am longing for a slightly larger chassis and something I can run Linux on without any compromises. I was considering a Framework of all things - but this post bolsters my concern that Apple is really on a completely different level. tl;dr the age of the Linux desktop is 100% here, but we still have a lot of work to do for notebooks

budududuroiu 1y ago

I run NixOS on Framework 13. For battery life, I just shutdown fully. My system boots back up in no time. I then just restore my Firefox session and I’m 99% back to where I was when I shut down.

commandersaki 1y ago

I’m a true believer of Framework’s mission. The technology is awesome. I have contention with this; Framework technology is anything but awesome. Their laptop line is just as mediocre as most PC laptops. Mediocre build quality, mediocre display, mediocre battery, lots of annoying flaws, etc. I didn't want to copy and paste my rant about the specific issues with Framework laptop, but here is one I posted awhile back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42564335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42564335