To be fair, the 11th gen did get an update that can be installed through LVFS so they seem to make an effort. But yeah my experience so far with the 12th gen has not been good (firmware wise anyway).
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I love my AMD framework 13. I use it with Arch and have solved or worked-around most of the issues so far, even tho battery life is still pretty bad.
Having said that, Iâd say itâs not a good choice for linux if you want âjust works, no strings attachedâ. This goes for the âofficially supportedâ distroes as well, where Iâd argue that things are even worse as software update cycles there tend to take longer.
Itâs good if youâre ok with tinkering, itâs âlinux friendlyâ but I wouldnât call it a good choice for linux.
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This week Framework released a beta EC update for the AMD version and you could installed it with fwupd. I have the impression they care to support LVFS
That would be smart. I see Dell provide updates via LVFS. KDE users could use Discover to locate updates then.
Iâm using Solus on my AMD Framework 13 and I know one of the Devs is getting a Framework 16 so I can say I is and should continue to be well supported there too
To be fair, almost all Linux issues on FW13 AMD have been due to the newness of the AMD 7040 platform, rather than Framework-specific.
Back in September, before I got my FW13 with AMD Ryzen 7840U, I spent some time playing with a new, Ryzen Pro 7840U-based Thinkpad P14s. Out of the 5 distros I had on my Ventoy USB, only one was able to even boot into a workable installation environment without kernel command line tweaks. Arch was useable, but crashing desktop, the screen flickering to black, color artifacts, and iffy suspend and resume all were happening quite a bit.
So, perhaps AMD 7040 isnât the best Linux choice, at the moment, if you want something problem-free. For me, the 780M iGPU was a must, and so I knew I was choosing AMD over Intel, regardless of its current maturity level.
After playing with the Thinkpad, the only thing I felt it had over the FW13 was a richer set of BIOS options (partly due to it being the Pro version of the APU), and, specifically, the ability to set the UMA buffer size to 8GB. I was still disappointed that 8GB was the limit - I wanted more, for StableDiffusion - but that was better than the 4GB on the FW. (Iâm mentioning the UMA buffer size because itâs particularly relevant for Linux: Windows drivers and ML frameworks depend on it less.)
Unlike the first couple of batches, the FW13 AMD I received already had the up-to-date BIOS installed. I still needed to upgrade the fingerprint reader firmware, and that was slightly stressful, due to misleading messages the upgrade tool was reporting. But, functionally, the upgrade worked for me on the first try, following the installation instructions Framework provided for Linux. At no point did I have to boot into Windows. And, if I understand it correctly, the experience was improved since, with the more recent version of the tool.
I canât really compare the community sizes, but the Linux-related discussions here have been both numerous and tremendously helpful. I feel the community support for Linux, including FW participation in it, has been incredible.
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