Framework Laptop 16 User Reviews

Last night I reversed the spacers - Left to Right and Right to Left - that made a much better fit. Now it’s just the Trackpad (front left corner) that is a bit raised. I was tempted to bend it, but figured I’d do more harm than good.

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Batch 13 here, received yesterday (technically it was here Friday morning but I wasn’t home).

Specs : DIY, 7840HS, no dGPU, French keyboard, 2x16Gb Crucial DDR5, 1Tb Samsung Evo 980 SSD. Fedora 40, Gnome 46, Wayland.

No issues building it except the stripped SSD screw, I’ve put a bit of Kapton tape to hold it in place waiting for a more permanent solution. Transplanting the SSD from my old laptop was the most complex part of the build, that’s how easy it is :wink:

What I love:
Everything works out of the box with Fedora, despite the SSD being transferred from an Intel system.
Keyboard feels soft and comfortable, I had no trouble adjusting to it. The fact it’s QMK-compatible is awesome, I’m looking forward to configure it like my mechanical keyboard.
The trackpad feels great and is very precise.
SO MUCH POWER, seriously I tried watching videos in a Virtualbox and it barely broke a sweat.
The 165Hz display feels so smooth!

Minor gripes:
As a lot of people said here, trackpad spacers and trackpad module don’t align perfectly. I would love to see a massive trackpad in a full-width enclosure.
The WiFi card sometimes crashes after waking up from sleep. I think I’ve seen this issue mentioned somewhere, I might replace it with an Intel card someday.

Big issues:
The screen is way oversaturated, and it’s very taxing for the eyes. I’ve tried different ICC profiles found around here, but none tame the colors enough to feel comfortable. It’s weird as I’ve never had such color issues on any laptop before, and it’s not like I can physically adjust settings like on an external monitor.

All in all, I love my new laptop despite its shortcomings. I will need to take a look at power saving profiles as it idles at around 10-12W which feels quite a lot.

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I don’t have that under KDE Plasma 6.0.4/Wayland. I bet you just need to lower the brightness and adapt the day/night colors.

I didn’t think about loading an ICC profile Are there any available?
PS: Hanging out in France too :wink:

Brightness is already quite down (around 20-25%), and I see no difference either in Hyprland or Gnome+Xorg. Is it possible that my unit is defective?

Can’t say sorry. Eventually a picture would help us understand better what you mean with oversaturated.

I tried as hard as I could to show the differences between my screens, but honestly it’s very hard to see on camera even if it’s obvious in person. Basically all the colors on the outside circle are too bright, especially the main colors. Red in particular is searing my eyes :smiley:

For example, here on this website, the “reply” button is more like a mashed pumpkin orange but on the laptop screen it’s a high-visibility-vest orange

Yeah. Guess you need to adapt the ICC or so.
You contacted support for this? Maybe they have more ways to figure it out.

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A work around for the colors being too bright could be to turn the “gamma” setting down.
“gamma” is a bit like a “brightness” setting, but tends to look better to the eyes.

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OK I think I’ve found something. By increasing the gamma to 1.2, I managed to make the colors a bit more washed out. I need to play with it a bit because it’s not really accurate but it already feels much better.

Edit: This is the tool I used:

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First month follow-up. Noticed a bit of light leaking from under the top of the bezel in about three locations that I can’t seem to solve by trying to reset it. Luckily it’s only really noticable in darker rooms. My new biggest complaint is also something that I enjoy about my new laptop which makes it extra sour. When under heavy load even with the Framework charger for this laptop plugged in (to the correct ports), the laptop will start to loose battery and eventually die. Which essentially limits the amount of time I can do meaningful work, like long compiles, in an unattended state. Sucks given the main reason I upgrade my 13 inch was for the cpu upgrade (which absolutely slays) but now I essentially have to fall back to my previous machine that can at least power itself under all loads. Annoying I thought but surely then I can just use two chargers or the framework charger and a power brick but no it will only accept one source of charge at a time. How is one suppose to keep this thing on?

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Set a power profile that limits power draw when you anticipate the load will outlast battery life?

Yes, that’s quick napkin math, not sure how one is suppose to anticipate such things until after that fact but if you have any good ideas I’m open to trying them. Either way, I didn’t fork over the difference for a more powerful cpu only to neuter it TDP-wise, when plugged in no less.

CPU-only shouldn’t drain the battery. That may only happen if both CPU and eGPU are in heavy use. So unless you’ve got the GPU module and your compiler is using that in addition to the CPU, the 180W charger should be more than enough. If not, something is wrong. I’d try another cable and a USB metering device (or power meter on the AC side) to check actual power delivery. Also, check if the USB-C module gets warm (it shouldn’t).

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Can confirm that. Only CPU will not drain the battery. Even my Dell WD19TB dock which provides only 60W will provide enough energy when I compile a kernel etc.
On some games, using the 180W power brick, it will start discharging my battery (Cyberpunk). Some others (God of War and Star Citizen Alpha) it works fine.
It really depends on the game optimization here.
PS: I play solely under linux (KDE Neon). No Windows installed!

So after a few weeks with my FW16 here’s a few thoughts I have on it. One of the first things I noticed about it was just how small the expansion cards were. They’re tiny! This is my first FW laptop so this is the first time I’ve actually got to see them. The pictures make them look bigger than they really are. The laptop is actually a bit smaller than I expected. It’s not as wide as my Razer laptop and it’s slightly lighter too.

The one thing that really bummed me about this laptop is the 7700S. I was really hoping to replace my desktop with this laptop but the 7700S just isn’t as powerful as my desktops GTX 1080. It’s close but definitely not equal.

Another thing to mention is the track pad and the spacers. I’ve got my track pad centered and it looks ok. Given what I’ve seen it looks like there is quite a variation on what people get. Personally mine doesn’t really bother me. If I spent a lot of time looking at my keyboard it might but mine also isn’t as bad as some others I’ve seen. I’d definitely like to see this refined or even a solid one. I get the idea behind customization but realistically I think people are just going to set and forget. I don’t see people switching things out very often.

I love the USB-C charging but I do find the restrictions with the ports a bit frustrating. I found a setup that seems to work for now.

Overall I love this laptop! I just wish the GPU was more powerful and there was less restrictions on the ports.

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Sounds like a fault. Like even at 100% CPU, with no real GPU load, I would never expect any laptop to do this.

I did recently have a weird experience with mine that might(?) be related. I was just working away as usual, while plugged in, and I got the low battery warning. I had been plugged in for days. I don’t even have the GPU module. Somehow, the battery hadn’t been charging. I unplugged and plugged in again and it started charging. So I’m not sure what happened. Maybe I just didn’t plug it in properly. But that seems unlikely because I can’t reproduce that effect even if I try. And when I unplugged it, it felt pretty tight.

Not sure what happened there but I’m keeping an eye on it.

Is there any chance yours just wasn’t charging at all?

Hi Igby, same thing happend to me twice. One day i used my Framework in the kitchen and had it plugged to the wall. Only light usage (Internet). Next day i opened the lid and it booted from Hibernation. When i tried to login i had critical low power (5% i think). I wondered how this could happen, i was sure the Laptop was plugged to the Wall. I didn’t check the Battery-Icon.
May be a week later i wanted to charge the Laptop. I am using the middle left port. This time i checked the Battery-Icon. It was not loading. As you i had to unplug and plug in again to charge.

I extracted an ICC profile from the Windows driver bundle.

On the Windows side of my dual booted system I opened it in NanaZip (a 7zip fork), and grabbed the .icm file from a folder labeled monitor.

Then on my KDE install I loaded that .icm file (works as ICC) and colors improved significantly.

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Any chance you could send it to me ? PM or so?
I don’t have a windows system, and wine stops in the process.

Just download the windows driver package and select “open with archive manager” (or whatever it’s called, I did use Dolphin). There you can navigate to the “monitor” folder in the top level of the archive and extract the file. No need to use wine, that would try (and fail) to install the drivers instead.