Hey i have my framework 12 for about half a year now and have been using Ubuntu lts for the entire time. I thought the battery life is a bit disappointing but i realized that i have the display on full brightness almost the entire time. I wanted to activate auto brightness but in the settings there is no option and under the iio path there is no ambient light sensor.
did anyone else encounter these issues? does the FW12 even have a ambient light sensor?
any help would be appreciated.
The supported ubuntu version is Ubuntu 25.10. So that’s where you’d be assured that things work out of the box. frame.work/laptop12?tab=linux. Though I’m not certain if the 12 has ambient light.
i have now upgraded to 25.10 but still no auto brightness it seems like there is just no ambi light sensor which is very very unfortunate. this probably halfs my usable battery time since i increase the brightness when its bright out and then forget to reduce it again. this seems like a huge oversight on frameworks behalf and i would love to see maybe an upgrade camera module that incorperates that
I wouldn’t say huge oversight, this is supposedly a budget product from the company. But i do agree it is frustrating and that there should be upgrade options to make the device more premium, things like backlit keyboard, support for a fingerprint senor in the power button. I would greatly appreciate upgraded audio support with a better DAC and Speakers onboard.
Huge might be a bit of a overstatement yes but with high displa brightness the battery life of the FW12 is honestly pretty trash with Linux and it dramatically increases with lower display brightnesses. So It would have been a pretty cheap option to extend real battery life quite considerably
Try Ubuntu 26.04. Life image. Ubuntu 25.10 does nog support display auto brightness.
How many hours are you getting on full brightness
? I am running Nobara 43 and on full brightness I’m getting greater than 5 hours. Watching YouTube videos in 1080p.
Edit: I will be doing a battery test proper and posting the results.
I’m not 100% positive, but I’m pretty sure the FW12 doesn’t have an ambient light sensor. There are a number of projects that can use the webcam as one, but are unlikely to be automatically used by Ubuntu.
I think about 2-3 hours with overleaf and a bit of python
Yeah that is unacceptable, for a modern device that costs at-least 800$ 