I rarely use suspend. Sure, wakeup is faster, but I pretty much just hibernate my laptop most of the time. Mine’s AMD, and I’ve rarely had issues with hibernate or wakeup, and the battery life’s better.
Interesting, thanks. I am not using secure boot, so presumably that is why I haven’t hit any issues. I thought that I saw a guide for using it on Fedora with secure boot. I will have to see if I can find that. I’m not running Fedora on my primary machines, but I could fiddle with it on one of the testers.
You are probably thinking of this. You need to roll your own kernel patches and sign things. It simply will not work out of the box currently. I’m hopeful that progress on UKI will improve the situation…somehow.
I think it was this Update on hibernation in Fedora Workstation - Fedora Magazine (or something like it). See the comments. It appears that in Fedora 41 hibernation does work with secure boot, and hopefully without requiring jumping through a lot of hoops. When time permits I will fiddle around and see what I can come up with. It won’t be a high priority as it’s not my primary system.
Although further reading of the comments indicates that the fact that it works is due to a bug that needs to be fixed and will result in it not working again. Oh, well.
I suppose if I had reason to require use of secure boot I would just shut the machine down if battery life were an issue. For me, boot times aren’t long enough, nor is restoring my workspace, that restarting would be an issue. As it is, unsecure hibernate is good enough for me. I understand that it might not be for others.
I enjoy the hardware, but I was expecting the Linux experience to be smoother. If I install Ubuntu LTS, I need to manually update the drivers (so that Mediatek wifi is a bit better) and both for Fedora/Ubuntu I have to manually set grub parameters to avoid the PSR bug. Both of these are not mentioned in the Linux installation guides.
I’ve just tried Windows on the laptop and everything is just better… Wifi is much much more stable (no packet loss basically, which I experienced a lot with any Linux distro), no sleep issues, touchpad scrolling speed is reasonable…
I’m running Win11 on my FW13 7040 AMD laptop. Went with the highest spec 7040 setup, ordered SSD (2TB) and RAM (64GB) separately.
Installing WIN11 had to go through WIN10 and was PITA but once it got working works like a charm.
The sleep functionality seems to be buggy though as the laptop runs hot when just closing the lid. Hibernation works like a charm though. Switchable ports are also working like a charm so far.
I have had issues with trackpad though where it gets clicked due to chassis bend when laptop is on uneven surface.
Other than that all chargers seem to have worked in hibernate/sleep/on state. Haven’t tried it in suspension yet and am not planning on it as for now.
Battery limited to 80% in bios for longetivity and seems to run for long enough running pretty much any daily task.
I just received the FW13 a week or so ago. Added RAM and SSD from AMZN with no issues and installed CachyOS. Everything works out of the box apart from wake up using the keyboard. You need to press the power button to get the unit to wake.
I am a bit concerned about hinges and display cables. The little plastic flaps on the display connectors look crumpled and used. Hinges look flimsy.
My gold standard/comparison are older Dell XPS 13 and even older Precision 4700 - a very serviceable absolute beast of a portable workstation. Both ran 7-8 years without issues, both bought used on eBay. The 4700 was completely disassembled and discrete GPU added, RAM maxed out, and every opening used for SSDs.
Given the flimsy-ness of the FW13 components I expect something to break soon, and to get to use my tinkering skills soon again.
I have had mine for 3 years. 0 need for maintenance for reference. I do like stronger hinges. I had the original and bought the 4lbs ones. It helped a lot, i dont know if the new models include these but that may help. Again for refrence I only chnaged the hinges a few months back the old hinges never broke or anything.
About the only issue I still have with my AMD framework on linux is the mediatek wifi/bt. It has gotten better then worse again across the firmware versions, so I’m now testing out replacing it with the QCNCM865 card.
The first chassis received was slightly bent out of shape (preorder unit), causing trackpad issues. FW support replaced both the chassis AND the trackpad free of charge. Can’t say anything negative about the support so far.
18 months into my ownership, running Ubuntu, and I have to say I agree with the OP - a disappointing experience overall. I bought this as my couch computer, replacing a much loved Acer Spin 714 Chromebook. My main work computer had recently changed from an XPS 13 to a Macbook Pro (with some reluctance from me, I was never a fan of MacOS). 18 months later, the comparison to all 3 doesn’t reflect well on the Framework These are the main issues I have experienced:
Random, extreme overheating. This is mentioned in a few places elsewhere, for both Windows and Linux installs. If you close the lid while charging (or possibly change after you close the lid?), occasionally it will overheat to the point where the whole laptop cannot be touched. Whatever the laptop is sitting on will become too hot to touch. If you listen you can hear there are no fans on whatsever. A scary experience! It has happened 3 times to me and I’m at the point now where I wouldn’t walk away from the laptop without turning it completely off.
Probably related to 1, the sleep is just borked. If the laptop sleeps with the lid up, it is probably 50/50 as to whether it will come back or not. If it doesn’t, you can try closing the lid, wait a second, then reopen it and that will get it to wake maybe 80% of the time. Every now and then waking from opening the lid doesn’t work and the power button just pulses - that requires a long press to force shutdown the machine.
Related to 1 and 2 (because I now turn the laptop off so much) - the boot time is not quick. When it does boot, the fingerprint reader time is also not quick - it can take anything from a second to several seconds before the “or place a finger on reader” prompt appears. You also can’t get to that point without hitting a key (and no, the reader button wouldn’t work, it just offers to shut down). This compares poorly to the experience of logging in with a mac, where you can just touch the reader from a sleeping state to log in. The FW requires at least two key presses before you can get to that point from sleeping.
The light sensor has never worked properly for me. Initially I just turned it off as there was a known issue. Then I saw one of the bios updates was promising a fix so turned it back on. Now when I first turn on, maybe 90% of the time the screen is at it lowest dimming setting and I have to manually brighten it. Turning it back off doesn’t seem to fix that, it just seems to be completely borked at this point.
The screen isn’t great. It isn’t bad either, but I knew I was kidding myself re it being ok when I turned on my 10 year old XPS (to use the one windows partition in the house) and the screen blew me away! This was from a laptop that was cheaper fully specc’ed than the FW was barebones. The macbook obviously is better but honestly even the chromebook had a better screen.
Battery life isn’t great. I’m not sure what I was expecting here. The macbook has crazy long battery life, as did the chromebook. I would say anecdotally this baby would never get through a full couch day without needing to be charged once, if not twice. And a couch day is just me browsing, I’m not doing any real work on it.
Little quality things - the screen is starting to become floppy, not to the point where it is falling back while I use it, but if I pick it up quickly it will often flop to horizontal. The port thingies are very difficult to get out, I have to take a sharp object to them to get them moving. Generally it runs hot, I’m typing this on my lap and it is burning the leg off me!
So that’s it - just a generally disappointing experience. In no way was it worth the money - nearly 1000€ completely barebones. Add a couple of hundred to that for memory and ssd and you are up to an M4 Mac Air, which would blow this out of the water. The repairability that I was so taken with when I first looked at Framework is beside the point if the basic unit isn’t good enough - there is no way I want to be lumbered with this baby for any longer than is necessary! The upgrades have been meh as well - in particular not going OLED on the new screen was disappointing.
Note that by co-incidence I had a member of the marketing team do a direct zoom chat with me during my ownership - I think it was a feedback thing they were doing with random customers. I went through all of my points here, including showing her the macbook boot up experience In fairness she did follow up and offered me a chance to discuss with the main linux guy, but at the time I was snowed under with work and couldn’t avail of that. Looking at the forums it seems pretty much all my issues have been discussed at some point and there don’t seem to be any solutions. I am on latest bios and having gone down a rabbit hole trying to fix the overheating issue previously I am on 24.04.2 with 6.12.3 kernel via mainline.
Regarding (4). This is a software problem related to gnome and wayland as far as I know. It does not handle error cases correctly, e.g. A failure to read the sensor should not result in a change of the screen brightness. It should take actions to recover the sensor instead. So most probably a software problem.
Regarding (5). This is a software problem related to gnome and wayland.
For me, the colours/brightness is just wrong in gnome/wayland but can be ICC corrected when using Xorg instead of wayland. In wayland, the ICC just does not work as expected.
I like watching movies on Gnome/Xorg, but they just look really bad on gnome/wayland.
So, I am guessing that your experience with (5) might be a software problem also.
I don’t know about your other points. I have a FW16, and not a FW13.
These are the main issues I have experienced:
In fairness she did follow up and offered me a chance to discuss with the main linux guy, but at the time I was snowed under with work and couldn’t avail of that. Looking at the forums it seems pretty much all my issues have been discussed at some point and there don’t seem to be any solutions. I am on latest bios and having gone down a rabbit hole trying to fix the overheating issue previously I am on 24.04.2 with 6.12.3 kernel via mainline.