Framework AMD 13 - review after one year (disappointment)

I definitely agree on the BIOS updates.

Imo Framework should prioritize owning their BIOS and providing timely updates to the existing boards before producing new boards.

One year in with the AMD board and I still cannot trust the laptop to keep a charge. I end up travelling with a Steam Deck + keyboard instead.

The kicker is I bought the AMD board hoping BIOS support would be better than the 11th gen.

I likely won’t be buying a new board unless it’s guaranteed to have reliable first-party firmware updates (core boot?).

This laptop clearly is leaving battery life on the table and I really just want suspend to last longer than 1day.

2 Likes

Any reason not to use hibernate or suspend-then-hibernate?

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.

Broken on linux for the most part. Kernel lockdown forbids it and gets enabled when secure boot is enabled.

1 Like

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.

1 Like

I essentially am waiting for UKIs also.

Because the NVMe is so easily removed I prioritize encryption + secure boot over hibernation.

The Fedors UKI plan afaik resolves the pick 2/3 scenario.

The ‘this’ is ambiguous, between (i) the Mac mentioned in the previous paragraph and (ii) the Framework laptop.

After one year I have 4 instances of suddenly no WiFi. I think it’s related to chassis flex, aluminum is too soft

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.