I made the grave mistake of buying my Framework 12 with 8 gigs of RAM. It’s slow, choppy, and it has to swap with the SSD very often. Is there any place I can get 16 gb for less than what it is from Framework (about $250)?
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looks like $214 is about as cheap as you can get it, unless you can find used somewhere for cheaper
What are you doing with it? A lightweight Linux distro should work fine with 8GB.
Depending on your country find price comparison sites which allow to set a price watch. From time to time there are deals.
I have Zorin OS 18.1. I am basically doing schoolwork and a little bit of model rocket simulation, but the battery life is not great and I am planning to upgrade to the Series 3 and I don’t want the RAM to bottleneck it.
Have you tried with a Framework supported distro and seen any change?
Ah, there’s quite a lot of battery-saving tips in this forum. I recommend starting off with uptime to look at your system load at three different interval levels. Post that here if you wish, and people will comment on it. You can often remove services that are not in use too e.g. printer queues.
Not yet. Is there a way I can do it while keeping my current installation as is?
Try booting up your Framework with a Live Linux version from a USB 3.0 or faster flash drive (8 Gigabytes or larger). That will run entirely from the RAM in your Framework and the RAM in the flash drive. It won’t touch your hard drive unless you specifically tell it to, so it won’t interfere with your internal M.2 NVMe SSD.
Installing the ISO or IMG file on your USB flash drive or USB external SSD will overwrite and destroy whatever files you might already have on it so, if you do have any files on it, back up your files to your internal hard drive or in some other way BEFORE you copy the ISO or IMG file onto the USB drive! Or just use a brand new USB flash drive or USB external SSD.
Go to the Distrowatch website (which is an excellent website for reviews of Linux distros, links to distro websites, Linux news, the question and answer column in the Newsletter, etc) and download several Linux distributions which are fast on machines with small amounts of RAM and slower processors.
Be sure to use a USB 3.0 or faster flash drive, if you boot up and run from a USB 2.0 flash drive that will slow down your PC quite a bit and not give you a very accurate idea of the performance.
Even better if you have a $3 USB 3.0 or faster external USB to SATA adapter or case and a 2.5” SATA SSD or even faster M.2 NVMe SSD with an adapter or USB case. It doesn’t have to be any larger than a 120 Gigabyte SSD since a basic Linux installation will take less than 16 Gigabytes on the drive.
Use Ventoy or dd in a console to copy the downloaded Linux ISO or IMG images to your USB flash drive or USB external SSD.
How to create bootable USB flash drive using dd:
Burn an ISO or IMG file
Use lsblk to find out the device ID for your USB flash drive or external USB SSD adapter or case and dd to copy the ISO or IMG file to your USB flash drive or external USB SSD adapter or case.
In the console, cut and paste the following commands. After typing or pasting in the command, press the ENTER key to run the command. If you type in the commands, check very carefully to make sure you haven’t made any typos:
lsblk
This will produce an output looking something like this:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sdb 8:16 1 14.5G 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 1 14.5G 0 part
In this example my 16 Gigabyte USB 3.0 flash drive is reported as a 14.5G disk which has a drive ID of /dev/sdb. In your case it might be /dev/sda or /dev/sdc or something else.
sudo dd bs=4M if=/path/to/some_linux.iso of=/dev/sdb conv=fsync oflag=direct status=progress
If you use cd to change into the directory to which you downloaded the ISO or IMG files, you can just type or copy and paste:
sudo dd bs=4M if=some_linux.iso of=/dev/sdb conv=fsync oflag=direct status=progress
Instead of typing “some_linux.iso” you type the name of the ISO or IMG file that you want to install on the USB flash drive or external USB SSD. Use ls to see the full name of the ISO or IMG file.
Just make sure /dev/sdb (or whatever lsblk showed) is your USB thumb drive. Really sure.
Plug the USB flash drive or external USB into your Framework with the Framework turned off.
Turn on the Framework and press down the F12 function key several times a second until you reach the boot menu. Use the keyboard up and down arrow keys to move the cursor to your USB flash drive or USB external SSD drive and press the Enter key.
The Live Linux distro will boot up to the desktop and you can see how it runs on your Framework.
It won’t be as fast as it would be if it were installed on your internal SSD but it will show you how it works and it may be considerably faster than the version you have installed on your internal SSD.
Try booting up your machine with LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) or MX-Linux KDE.
You could also try antiX Linux - it’s designed to require very little RAM and it runs quite fast on older computers so it should be quite fast on yours.
And try running EasyOS Linux - it runs entirely in RAM and is extremely fast in as little as 4 Gigabytes of RAM.
As far as cheap RAM goes, you can get used DDR5 5600 SODIMMs from eBay for less than the price of new RAM. Avoid getting Kingston DDR5 or any DDR5 SODIMMs that are not 5600 speed or faster as they may not work. There are lists of tested DDR5 DIMMs on the Framework website.
I’ve bought used RAM from eBay, tested it thoroughly with long memtest86+ tests and it’s worked fine. You can return it if it doesn’t pass the memtest86+ if the seller says it works and it doesn’t but that hasn’t happened me so far. If RAM passes a long memtest86+ test, it probably will last as long as new RAM.
I’ll try that this weekend.
As an alternative to live distros, you can also get a cheap 128GB NVMe drive - I can get one for £15 delivered here in the UK. You just take out your existing OS and put in a fresh disk. It does require a bit more faff, but it also ensures you don’t accidentally overwrite your existing data!
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Here is my uptime output. None of the battery saving tips I’ve found from searching really apply to me, but I’ll keep looking.
11:01:45 up 1:31, 1 user, load average: 1.36, 1.09, 1.00
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I bought it used on a local marketplace. Works fine.