I’ve been lurking on the forum for quite a while, and what I perceive to be a bit of an inflammatory tone in this post was somehow the thing that drove me to write my first.
First, to answer your question: Yes. Yes, there are obviously many OS/distro/DE configurations that work (and work well) on these laptops. There are already hundreds of people on online communities showing off their neat setups, here and elsewhere. They have win10, win11, arch, fedora, ubuntu, a bunch of dual boot configs, etc. Your situation does sound very annoying, and there are many people having many different issues across many different setups, but suggesting that this product might not be “usable within the RMA period” is quite a stretch. We’ve seen the work done with intel BIOS updates.
You tell us a few things about your setup, but the main point is that you are using a beta version of an OS on a first generation machine. I do not understand how and why some members of the community expect 99% reliability from this kind of setup. My suggestion to you is to try to use a different platform (e.g., bootable) to test for any hardware issues or to share logs to see if anyone else has had similar issues. Specifying the problem seems to help most others on the forum.
I’m an AMD Batch 3’er, and I’ve been quite happy seeing the community and the FW support staff help people on a variety of issues. Makes me feel more confident about whatever configuration I imagine for my FW. I don’t want to be one of those people telling you to “go buy a Dell then” but I do kind of want many members of the community to consider the position of the company and the community a bit more before implying the laptop is just inherently unstable.
I am running NixOS on my 7640U FW13. The only time my laptop becomes nonfunctional is coming out of standby. The only other issue I have at the moment is with the amdgpu drivers forcing X11 at first until I log out and back in again, which is the same issue everyone has until we get a firmware update.
Yikes, good thing you and I are not in the marketing department. Imagine this applies to the FL16 as well. (But there’s been mention that Framework is working closer with distro teams to get a better experience in the near future)
(and I’m neither agreeing or disagreeing with your statement)
On that note, I guess you’ve answered the OP’s bolded question.
Fedora 39 should get the go this Thursday with the release in the following week. However if you’ve updated the beta installation, there probably won’t be that many additional fixes.
However Fedora is one of the supported Linux distributions, so if you continue to have problems, Framework Support will help you.
I am sorry I came off like that, I have rewritten my original post, hopefully it sounds less inflammatory.
Although I was frustrated from delayed batch 1, to delayed BIOS, together with the unstable unit in the end, I am still with this machine because I believe in the mission of framework, their support, and this community. Otherwise, it would be much easier for me to “get a Dell”, but I am still here because I am committed to make this laptop work.
I have showed my experience setting up this laptop, but that does not mean the laptop is stable. I have seen several people showed off their setup and later documented problem with the system, it is not mutually exclusive.
Because Fedora 39 BETA is the officially most recommended distro:
I don’t think it is the hardware issue in particular, it is more likely the driver, firmware, and bios issue. I have never intended to imply that this is the fault of framework, I am sorry if it seems that way.
Hi, thank you for your response! I appreciate it. Can you elaborate a bit on what app do you use, and what DE are you using? So that I can try to replicate your setup.
What is your workaround to this issue? Just shutdown instead of suspend?
Yeah, you’ll likely need to wait this out. This has, historically, been an annual exercise (getting hardware to work with distros).
The next bit of concern you stated is how this relates to the RMA period. Say even if you get BIOS updates and final Fedora release today…(not likely, but say you do)…there’ll still be bugs (stable-ish, maybe, crash-free, maybe not).
This is indeed what I am afraid of. If Fedora hit their early release target of Oct 17th, I think it might be able to fix some problem before the RMA. But for now it is unlikely.
I understand there will be bugs, but I am willing to make the trade-off as long as the platform will become stable in a couple month. What I am afraid of is that 7040U becomes an abandoned platform since not many laptops are on this platform and it is still unstable half-a-year after its announcement.
I use Gnome for my DE, and Edge, Firefox, VSCode, KeepassXC, blackbox, docker, and others. I’m set up with Secure Boot and TPM auto-unlocking LUKS partition as well. Currently on kernel 6.6.0-rc6 though I ran 6.5.7 as well with similar results.
Yeah, and if I forget to shutdown I force shutdown and restart.
That is quite similar to my setup. Do you mind sharing your Nix config so that it is easier for me to get started? I tried Nix couple years ago, and it was a distro that is quite hard for me to get started with.
Sure, I manage my system configuration in a GH repo so it’s publicly available:
I use nix flakes and split up some of the configuration for different systems and home-manager use, but everything is linked from the flake.nix to try to make it easier to follow.
Edit: I also started on detailed instructions for installing a similar setup, but it’s still WIP - regardless feel free to DM me if you are wanting any help/feedback. We also have a NixOS thread over here
That is a really good question. As always with good questions, the answer is complicated.
My wife has one of my backup laptop that I can technically reclaim, but she is (understandably) protective of her setup. So I will need some effort on that front to get a working machine. Another way is to exchange for an intel framework.
But it is quite obvious none of these option will work nearly as well as my current framework; many reports 7040U was close to the performance of M2, and it is quite obvious that there is no Linux/Windows laptop CPU that can match its power-efficiency.
So if I don’t find a good setup here, I will try to seriously consider the above options before the RMA period.
I think your best option right now would be to run a Linux VM from a Windows installation on your FL13 AMD. That way, you don’t have a hard dependency on the distro supporting the hardware. The performance capability of the 7040U lineup can offset the virtualization penalty…and still come out ahead of the FL13 Intel offerings.
That is, assuming the Windows side of things is fairly solid (base on the lack of posts with Windows-AMD issues).
I was expecting it today too, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be happening.
They are still working on blocker issues that is holding the final release.
For the Fedora 39 release, there is pretty much only one Raspberry Pi 4 related blocker bug left, if that can be resolved quickly (within about 36 hours), you can expect a release on the 31st. Otherwise, there should be no problem using the Beta until the official release, the AMD related bugs seem to be all fixed.
Actually, after BIOS 3.03 I have yet to see any crashes on Fedora 39 Beta. I can finally search and open new app without fear! I even enabled extensions!