I just received my 13 Pro and must say I’m very disappointed with the screen resolution handling. There is no 3:2 option for half resolution. 200% scaling in Gnome works in about 80% of the apps right, with the rest messed up in various ways. I actually use my computers for stuff other than web apps, so the inability to change resolutions is a major pain. Running Memtest86+ was crazy with a little postage stamp in the middle of the screen. Grub uses the whole screen, but it’s unreadable. I’m sure it’s fixable, but having to hack every app sucks.
Although the body of the laptop is quite high quality, one can only describe the magnetically held on bezzel as poor.
I’m on the fence about returning two of them as I bough one for a family member too. Hopefully Windows works better, but I doubt it. Old windows apps don’t support scaling at all, so I expect them to be unusable.
Ah, I had this - but I corrected it. Confusingly, there are several versions of memtest86. One is proprietary with a free version (which also didn’t take up the whole screen for me) and one is actual open-source software (this was fine).
I use Cinnamon in Mint, and I found scaling across a mix of 1080p and 4K screens to be poor until I turned on Fractional Scaling - this was a game-changer. FWIW, I can see a 3:2 option (2880 x 1920) in my displays list.
My point is not that you should swap to Mint - it is that your OS/desktop is likely in control of the options you have. Thus, I think your problem is not hardware-related, and it is very fixable.
Windows 11 testing worked perfectly. Ancient WinForms apps do scale properly.
Setting Grub to 1024x768 works well for making it viewable.
I also set the Linux kernel to use a larger terminal font, which worked well.
I’ll have to try fractional scaling as mixing monitors with the internal display gives less than ideal results. I have a Dell WD22TB4 dock on the way, hopefully it will make external displays better.
I was quite impressed with the driver packages for Win 11, everything went very smoothly doing a fresh install.
In my experience there are some kinds of programs that behave bad on scaling:
electron-based apps
Some Flatpaks
ancient X11-programs
Apps using simpler frameworks like TCL/TK, …
Using native new-world apps in Gnome oder KDE Plasma behaves most of the time OK to me. (But not as optimal as I knew it from my MacBookPro 2013 with Retina)
(My screenshot is from an old version of Mint, taken on my old laptop - I think newer versions are more comprehensive. However, that menu option is in the same place).
How do you change it? On my FL16 just changing the screen size in the Grub file doesn’t change the screen resolution, I still end up with micro miniature text in the corner.
My own experience, I prefer how KDE Plasma handles scaling especially across multiple monitors. If you find gnome settings GUI to be lacking try plasma. Use one of the live distros like fedora kinoite on a USB key if you want an experiment. But you can install Plasma on any distro.
From my experience, all apps work great with fractional scaling on KDE Plasma—X11, Electron-based (running both under Wayland & X11 ozone), etc. It’s mainly Gnome’s implementation that sucks ass.
I believe that for Gnome 50 there was a pretty major overhaul of the graphics settings as they brought in Wayland by default… so if you’ve not tried v50, you might find it much improved.
I’m running Fedora on both my (non-FW) desktop and my FW13 laptop… but I run KDE on the desktop and Gnome on the laptop… I don’t have issues with either.
For Grub, I added “GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768” to /etc/default/grub
This worked great for me, I’m running Debian Trixie.
Since Windows 11 worked perfectly, I’m keeping both laptops. My family member’s runs Windows and it was important that they not have issues. I’m more willing to tweak.
In case anyone is curious, I was able to upgrade a family member’s old windows 10 laptop to the framework by full disk copy.
Used “dd” to copy old SATA SSD from the old laptop to the Framework 13 Pro. The Old was 2010ish laptop with a dual core i7
Windows 10 booted fine and was able to login. Only the wireless was not supported. I tried the Framework driver package, no luck with the wireless on Win 10
Did a Win 10 to 11 update by booting off Win 11 install media
Installed Framework’s driver package. All is well.
For the thread, I have bumped into an interesting problem. This is really a Linux issue, not a Framework one.
I am out and about all the time, so running in single-screen mode is essential for me. However, when I am at home, running with secondary monitors is a much nicer experience. I am hooked up to just one secondary monitor these days, and it’s 1920x1200, which means that I need to use 100% scaling. However, on the main laptop screen, I need to use 200% scaling.
I think this is complicated by the fact that my main working machine is a VM. I was originally using VirtualBox, and on the FW 13 Pro I decided to swap to QEMU with Remote Viewer. So it is hard to know how the physical monitor is exposed to the VM guest - and whether the right scaling figures are supplied. It looks like Firefox and common tools like the file manager re-scale automatically, but PhpStorm (a programmers’ editor) does not; it needs a restart and a console parameter to force it to scale in x2 mode.
One solution I might try is to swap the 1920px monitor for a 4K, which should get by with 100%. I think Linux is fine with either, it’s the chopping and changing it doesn’t like so much.
I’d like to report success with a Dell WD22TB4 dock and dual monitors. I purchased this to run a 1080p 60Hz and a 4k 30Hz monitor. The internal display and the two external displays work great. To simplify scaling, I switch the 4k 30Hz monitor to 1080p 60Hz.
Updating the firmware on the Dell WD22TB4 worked flawlessly, I’m so impressed how Linux has progressed in this area.
