I’ve been using the 12th gen Framework 13 with Fedora for a while now, and in general love the self serve aspect. But (yes, we all saw that coming) I have concerns about CPU temperature.
I used to let my desktop environment manage the CPU, and it would regularly hit 95 degrees. Recently I have switched to Tuned, which gives me finer grained control, but on balanced it will still easily top out at 95 degrees with 20% CPU usage until I switch to one of the battery save modes, which significantly hurt performance.
I suspect that there is a mixture of issues here, and in part the power management tools in Linux are just not that good, possibly. I have had a go at writing a background script that adjusts the maximum frequency across cores using an inverse relationship with the temperature. Using a gradual curve, I can get a much better experience than with any of the power management tools that are usually deployed with Linux.
Experience, though, is subjective.
Basically, I’ve managed to avoid the overheat and suddenly drop to 400Mhz that other users have had with some sneaky and adaptive throttling, whilst avoiding the heart stopping performance drop that the battery saving modes give, but should it be this way?
I see that some threads discuss the relative benefits of applying fresh thermal paste to the CPU, something I am happy to do. Has anyone tried this, and is it worth it?
Is it possible that the thermal paste the chip comes with is degrading or was applied sub-optimally at the factory?
Is Linux just not good at thermal management?
Your thoughts and suggestions will be appreciated.