I’ve been eyeing the Framework laptop since it first came out, but I live in Sweden so it wasn’t really an option until now.
I’m looking to buy the Graphics Module to allow for some gaming. I’ve used Debian for over 25 years so I wanna stick to that. The last 15y I’ve been on Mac for my desktop though so haven’t really kept up with Linux on desktop.
Are there any pitfalls or known limitations to be mindful of in regards to getting the GPU working properly under Debian? I don’t wanna get stuck in a situation where I’m (for some reason) forced to switch distro just to get some gaming on. I will also be running 1 or 2 extra monitors but I’m gonna assume that won’t be a big deal these days.
Running Ubuntu 24.04 (a Debian variant) and there were zero issues with the setup. It was the easiest setup of various machines I have had over the years (Dell and System76, and probably one or three others).
The main problem you’ll run into is that Debian ships an ancient GPU firmware snapshot and refuses to update it.
The second problem is that power profiles daemon is out of date in the stable release which will affect your power consumption.
If you pick up a modern kernel and modern GPU firmware snapshot and a newer power profiles daemon package you should have a “relatively” similar result as other distros.
First thing I tried on receiving the Framework (no graphics module) last week was the current Debian release with xfce4. There were several annoyances, stuff just not working right so switched to Xubuntu 24.04 (the Ubuntu distro that uses xfce4), which works excellently on the Framework hardware. (As you might guess, I’m no fan of Gnome, especially the Ubuntu version. But Canonical otherwise does a good job polishing up Debian.)
I’ve tried Ubuntu before and always found it quite bloated. Most things can be removed I suppose but I still prefer the minimalist approach that I can take with a Debian install.
I’ll consider Ubuntu though, since Debian isn’t the most up to date OS out there.
Kinda starting to feel like a pure Debian install isn’t going to be optimal. I’m gonna have to dig into Ubuntu a little. I’ve found it bloated before but perhaps there is a way of getting rid of the crap I don’t want.
Not something I’ve tried on the Framework, but some of the Ubuntu bloat can be avoided by starting with the “server” version, then adding one of the lighter-weight desktops rather than Gnome. What Canonical does with Gnome is pretty obnoxious, if you know your way around an OS – they really go for the novice user as their target.
I’ve been using Debian since mine arrived back in April.
I found it to be only a touch more work to get set up than when I installed Ubuntu on Framework 13 a few years back. I gave up on Ubuntu; that Snap store is awful, it’s like running a docker container for every app, and Ubuntu keeps removing the non-Snap packages for applications.
Back to the Debian install: I had to add rtc_cmos.use_acpi_alarm=1 to Grub, I believe in order to get sleep and hibernate to work reliably. Most everything else sorted itself out after I upgraded the kernel to 6.5. I understand that 6.10 has much better support for the graphics; I might build the kernel but so far the machine has been doing what I want after I got ROCm setup so it may not be necessary. My notes include downloading amdgpu-install_6.0.60002-1_all.deb from the ROCm site, doing an “apt-get install equivs” and an “apt-get remove xtrx-dkms”. At some point I needed “amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x410” on the kernel command line and have since removed it. I upgraded the firmware for the devices by downloading a tarball from kernel.org.
Some usage notes: I get an occasional lock-up-on-hibernate that means the machine has to be powered down (losing all work, unfortunately). I also get the occasional video card driver crash or lockup, usually when Firefox does something stupid - that sort of thing goes away once the video card has been supported in the kernel for a couple of years. And the mediatek wifi card just sucks - this is not a Debian or even a Linux thing, it’s bad on every OS.
I don’t do any gaming, but I do occasional work in CAD or Blender, and have been running lots of AI code on the discrete GPU. It seems to work well enough out of the box in the 3D applications, and getting the special sauce (ROCm) from AMD is pretty straightforward if you find you need better CUDA compatibility. Mostly it’s a matter of just picking the right package, as the version number for ROCm is tied to the supported hardware and not to how current the code is.
In short: Install Testing, not stable and get the updated firmware from kernel.org and you are good to go. Besides some issues still present in AMDs drivers/firmware I haven’t really noticed any issues on Debian. And thanks to updates firmware, the issues don’t show that often. Only annoying thing - that all distros using Kernels beyong 6.6 will have - is that the MediaTek WiFi is just crappy and e.g. won’t work after waking up from hibernation.
All in all definitely not worth to bother getting Ubuntu to a point where it’s acceptable.
There’s still the power-profiles-demon problem, right? Which I recall requiring some changes that only appeared in 6.10, but I might be confusing that with the discrete GPU power usage. That is one of the remaining items on my to-fix list, as I get maybe an hour of battery life outta this thing despite the thirty pounds of battery.
And yeah, agreed, with the testing distro and firmware updates, Debian works just as well as the Ubuntu version.
I don’t know of any ppd issues. The latest issue I know of that has nothing to do with Debian is that hardware decoding of videos is terribly inefficient in all Phoenix SoCs. A patch has been posted, but too late for 6.10. So it will probably land in 6.11.
Either way, if there are mayor efficiency improvements with 6.10, I’ll find out soon. Either it will be available in testing/sid very soon or I’ll compile myself. But since Testing has 6.9.8 for 3 days now and sid has 6.9.9 for two, I doubt it will take that much time for 6.10 to hit. But I’m far beyond just 1 hr of usage, so that sounds a lot like an efficiency issue with the dGPU.
You’re absolutely right. Looks like ppd got missed when I changed the source.list entries from “bookworm” to “testing” and did an upgrade, despite using --with-new-pkgs:
bash# dpkg -l power-profiles-daemon
ii power-profiles-daemon 0.12-1+b1 amd64 Makes power profiles handli>
A manual install brought it up to the proper version:
bash# dpkg -l power-profiles-daemon
ii power-profiles-daemon 0.21-2
Thanks for the heads up! I’ve not yet had a free evening to dedicate to pursuing the power problem, and this looks like it will do the trick.
EDIT: Yup, it did. Problem was a package held back by apt (uim was the one reported, but ultimately it was caused by glibc-2 package upgrade failing). Battery life is roughly 5 hours now.