The new and upgraded Framework Laptop

>We continue to focus on solid Linux support, and we’re happy to share that Fedora 36 works fantastically well out of the box, with full hardware functionality including WiFi and fingerprint reader support. Ubuntu 22.04 also works great after applying a couple of workarounds, and we’re working to eliminate that need.

This disclaimer -from a company that picks their hw components none the less- is cold water to Linux in the desktop as any sort of "solved" problem

Well to be fair, no desktop experience is solved if one isn't allowed to apply adjustments for their hardware (drivers, user space tools and whatnot).

My experience on Linux certainly isn't flawless, but I have about as many issues whenever I'm handed a Windows laptop as others have trying Linux. Computers suck.

It is laptop, not desktop ;)

To be fair to them, _desktop_ Linux is a fair bit easier than laptop Linux. Laptops have many of the components that have been the most neglected/hardest to work with - wifi cards, bluetooth, trackpads, fingerprint readers... All all the worse because there's often less or no choice of provider for the components.

For the most part, on a full desktop, you can avoid most of the need for those, or buy a part that works better.

To be fair to Linux on the desktop, one of the major challenges is synchronization between new hardware platforms (12th Gen Intel Core), and distro cycles (22.04). We fully expect that the next point release of 22.04 will have a kernel that works well out of the box with 12th Gen. Fedora seems to more consistently be able to go out with more recent kernels. Fedora 36 with 5.17.6 works smoothly.

Desktop Linux was historically meant as opposed to server.

Plus, most actual desk tops today feature laptops.

So still a desktop use case: it's just not in "tower" or "mini-tower" or "all-in-one" form.

There's no such operating system as "Linux". I don't know what these "workarounds" are exactly, but if it's something like installing a driver for a fingerprint reader that's present in a standard Fedora distro, but not in a vanilla Ubuntu then I don't see the problem. Of course it won't work out of the box.

I mean, Apple makes the whole stack, more or less, and I have trouble there, too. So, honestly, yeah. Software is a goddamned disaster.

Not if you buy the mainboard and mount it in a little desktop case!

We're exploring if there is any other workaround, but it is likely that until a 22.04 point release goes out with a new kernel, it will require installing a newer kernel from Ubuntu's kernel PPA to make suspend work properly.

I'm wondering what's the battery life and power usage under Linux. For many laptops this is a problem.

Are distros doing too much customization?

The kernel is famously backward compatible, upgrading during a distro cycle shouldn't be a problem. Yet fedora doing so is somehow exceptional.

Had this issue with System76, which offers NVIDIA cards that suck on Linux, and various hardware that requires firmware not in the linux kernel or anywhere else, where you have to install and update that firmware separately (like windows).

All they make are Linux computers and they couldn't/didn't/wouldn't for some reason produce a laptop that just natively worked.

Linux on a desktop is really quite rock solid (caveat assuming you do research if you are too cutting edge on hardware). Linux in laptops are not as good on battery life and 4k external monitor support has issues (though less so if wayland works on your hardware). The two workarounds they mention for Ubuntu on their page are adding a kernel option to improve suspend battery life, and adding a line in the alsa conf to enable the driver that recognizes the microphone jack they're using...you can hardly extrapolate from those to "desktop linux is teh pits".

Recently I built a new PC, and after having Nvidia driver issues for years on my old PC, I decided I'd go AMD instead.

After at least 10 years using Linux, I'm back to Windows.

The main issue I had was a very intermittent flicker on my screen when I'm on 144Hz. This happened on Wayland and X11. Almost every single distribution had this issue; OpenSUSE, Fedora, Arch (and derivatives), Debian, PopOS.

The only distribution where this wasn't a problem was Ubuntu which worked great for a while, but I updated and had a few issues. Also, realised after briefly trying other distributions that Snaps were really slow, so I just couldn't stay with Ubuntu. I tried disabling Snaps, but then the store broke and the non-snap store kept crashing (I generally install software via terminal but it's nice to browse and see what's out there occasionally).

Oddly, I've found Windows 11 mostly okay - at least I have no flicker at 144Hz.

You can manually update to a newer kernel and generally have it work as end user. For a distro maintainer though, you have to pick a stable target to develop, validate, and release against. Fedora seems to typically be slightly more aggressive on their intercepts than other major distros.

I've had my framework laptop for about six months and I'm not really a linux adept (I basically just read online guides and bash on my keyboard until the problem fixes itself). But honestly, I genuinely enjoy using the framework laptop with Fedora.

The battery life during light(7w)-moderate(12w) usage is approximately 5 hours.

Stand-by was the real issue in my opinion (it would drain 1-2%/hour). I got around this issue by setting up a swap partition and forcing hibernation after 30 minutes of sleep standby.

Apparently there are some new tweaks that were added to improve standby, but I am happy with where I am and don't want to change anything, so I can't speak to their efficacy.

Do you have tlp installed?

> caveat assuming you do research if you are too cutting edge on hardware).

Or just buy Linux hardware with Linux pre-installed, with great support for it...