Oooooh my god it’s been a fun week on this.
Got my Sage on monday, set it up with Ubuntu because I wasn’t sure how I’d end up using it.
Suffered that for about a day or so before I lost my last rag with Gnome being overly opinionated and knuckled down and installed Arch using these walkthrough instructions: https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Arch+Linux+on+the+Framework+Laptop+12/408?lang=en
Borked the install with a fatfinger typo first round, had another go and it was gravy there on in.
Ohhhh KDE how dost I love thee, I’mma not count the ways because I’d be here all day, but KDE, + no big num OS releases + AUR make a bonce a happy happy boy.
First thing I did was test out the cheapy stylus I bought of AliExpress (I won’t link it, track it down if you like but it’s only barely just worth the £15 GBP I paid for it) to update my avatar.
Then I just started actually using it, and it’s been excellent. Only thing I haven’t quite gotten working is an automatic onscreen keyboard in tablet mode and auto rotation and rotation lock, but this is Arch, it’s just a matter of time and frustration before I sort it.
Got fedora kinoite set up on mine, its working well.
A lot of this is new to me, first time installing ssd and ram, was spooky but not too bad in the end.
Really love the device. The expansion cards are way smaller than I expected, just makes the sd one more impressive. The screen feels bigger than expected because of the resolution.
Second time using linux after using mint on an old dell laptop with a slow hdd, excited to use on a modern device. I was interested in trying out an atomic distro, as well as kde. So far im impressed by the kde desktop, worked perfect out the box and it definitely suits me. Its always a treat to see my colemak keyboard layout available by default unlike on windows, and the software center is so nice. I’ve done one system update and it went smooth, a good sign, only time can tell how reliable it is. I had trouble with updating and failing to shutdown on mint many times on the dell, it is just a random old device to be fair, compared with fedora being very well tested on framework laptops. The single issue (you can barely call it) is after the system update I had to re-input wifi password. I didnt have to on the next restart, so not sure why it was the case.
I anticipate a bit of a challenge setting up vscode and jetbrains suite for programming with containers, we shall see. I dont expect this to be a main programming machine, but it will be nice to be able to use it on the go.
I have everything up and running. Took a bit to get rotation working properly in my NixOS setup and then that broke my wallpaper setup, but I got that resolved.
Only issue I’ve had is that the machine randomly powers off. I read someone else had the issue and corrected it with reseating the battery. I did that and thought I had fixed it, but it has started doing it again. Anyone else running into this?
Typing from my set up rn with NixOS and gnome. I’m gonna try to set up touch support on something like Sway or Hyprland next. Some community members already tried and discussed it. I did sort of ran into some nixos-config issues but I think it’s primarily my fault with my flake setup (non-nerds can ignore that sentence lol)
I haven’t had any cracks and the screen looks perfectly fine for my needs; artists may differ though.
The only issues I have right now are that the thing can get really hot doing only basic stuff for an amount of time (I even put most of the BIOS settings for the cpu set to the lower power options, so the only other options are to increase the fan speed or use an external cooler), the constant memory checks are a little annoying (if anyone knows how to turn that off please let me know), and BIOS is telling me my cpu fan is not installed even though i definitely know it’s working (I’m not sure if that’s a long term issue or not)
I’m running hyprland with tablet super, etc. Works pretty well. The random power stuff is not cool though. I’m going to install a different distro to make sure it isn’t my configuration.
Raise a support ticket if you haven’t already… I haven’t seen anything like that personally (I’m obligated to say loudly that I’m using Arch), but if others have then support will likely have the best suggestions.
And yeah, it might be distro but even still… it might not…
I’m not sure what i’m doing wrong, i even tried installing packages the module comes with like kitty and stuff but it’s like my keyboard stops working when i’m in Hyprland.
it’s not a distro thing, It happened to me when I was booting up Fedora and even Windows. It’s gotta be a bug in the bios, or perhaps our screws for our heatsinks are a bit off somehow.
is “tablet super” a thing? i can’t find anything called this online.
i’d love to try out hyprland but am struggling with how i would run apps with the keyboard folded back. i’m not seeing anything for hyprland that works similar to the gnome activities overview
Support isn’t terribly helpful to be honest. I explained the issue and they want me to try a bunch of stuff you see if it fixes it. Unfortunately it’s hard to know because it RANDOMLY powers off.
I booted it up yesterday before support got back to me and it indeed happened again. Then when I booted it up again I got the attached screen. I suspect this might be the issue. I opened it up to see if the fan connection was loose and it was seated pretty snuggly. I removed and reseated just to make sure. This screen shows on every boot now.
So I wonder if the fan is/was faulty and the hardware would shutdown when it lost the fan in a method of self preservation? I can’t say, but surely they should be able to.
Anyway, I explained this to support and they want me to try some things to see if it continues to power off randomly, but I don’t feel comfortable doing that with this warning appearing.
After working with support and going through their troubleshooting steps I’m sad to announce that my little Framework 12 is now completely dead. I can no longer get it to turn on at all anymore.
Sounds like a faulty mainboard (makes sense at this point—glad they had me do all the tests). Sounds like my DIY is going to be a little more involved…which I’m actually excited about haha. Anyway, I love this computer even though I haven’t been able to use it much yet. I can’t wait to be able to use it without having to tiptoe around moving the screen and stuff. Now to save up for a Framework Desktop
Anyone else running into this?
