Hi, I’ve got Framework 13 DIY (AMD Ryzen 7840U) and a lot of issues with docking station which is Thinkpad Thunderbolt 3 Dock Gen 2. Docking station itself works fine with another laptop (Thinkpad), but with Framework it works… sometimes. At first I’ve thought it might be OS issue (I use Arch BTW), but it’s probably not this, as I can notice problems even before powering on.
Namely I connect thunderbolt cable and sometimes I can see laptop is charging (red led) or is fully charged (white led), sometimes - just no leds. Or red led blinking slowly. It’s hard to determine why sometimes it works, sometimes not at all.
Changing USB-C port sometimes helps, sometimes not.
When it works, it works fine. Unless I try to change something - e.g. when I disconnect thunderbolt cable and connect it again, it will not work most probably.
BIOS is up to date (3.03)
How can I solve it? I can buy another docking station if it will work - can you recommend any?
Have a lot of external devices (Jabra, camera, 2 monitors, keyboard etc.) so I can’t survive with 4 ports only.
1 Like
I’m in the exact same boat. Framework 13, Thunderbolt 3 Gen 2 dock, Arch Linux, dock works fine with a thinkpad.
I experience the things you described. Though also, it seems not to work with two external monitors while the power delivery is working? I can get both monitors to work fine while the laptop is not charging.
All the peripherals seem to work either way.
Have you found any solutions?
Edit: I’ve just updated the firmware of the dock to the latest (July 2023), and it’s still intermittently working, but at least the monitors work fine when the laptop does charge now.
+1 out here with my new-to-me Ryzen Framework. This dock has worked perfectly with basically everything I’ve ever thrown at it, so it’s disappointing to see it fall flat with this machine.
Things improved a little after updating the firmware to the latest version; before it wouldn’t even charge or do basically anything right. But it still doesn’t work reliably.
I noticed that things are slightly more reliable if I use the bottom-right Expansion Bay with a USB-C card. I thought that might be the case since it’s not even going to attempt to do Thunderbolt with that port. Sadly even now the LAN adapter just falls off the bus after a while.
I dunno what I’ll do now, I don’t really want to replace this dock.
I’ve tried some other things, but unfortunatelly I had some other problems with Arch on Framework. Like overheating issues + loud fans, poor energy management etc. At last filesystem (ext4) got corrupted and I had to manually recover all my data. So I gave up and installed Fedora. Works perfectly since then, looks much more stable, but it’s just couple of weeks.
Odd because I’m also using Fedora (Silverblue) and still having these issues.
Please don’t post AI slop here, it’s not helpful to anyone.