Ubuntu configuration *without* major GPU issues?

Framework Laptop 16 Linux
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Hello. I’m trying to find a “sweet spot” configuration of Ubuntu on the FW16 with dGPU that doesn’t have deal-breaking GPU issues – graphical corruption, framerate issues, or application crashes. By sharing this and starting a conversation, I’m hoping to find (for me and others) a configuration that is suitable for those of us trying to do graphics development work on the FW16 using a relatively stable / mainstream distro.

Unfortunately, every configuration I have tried or read about has significant issues:

Ubuntu 22.04

This is what I originally installed on my FW16. Unfortunately, I discovered that under this release, running Blender would cause amdgpu to immediately hang and crash most (but not all) of the time. I haven’t confirmed the root cause, but this bug report describes similar behavior that was eventually fixed in mesa.

Hoping that a newer mesa release would resolve the issue, I updated to 24.04.

Ubuntu 24.04

In this release (which I currently have installed), Blender now runs without crashing. However, a bug in mutter causes many GPU-accelerated applications to drop below 60 FPS (or whatever the display refresh rate is set to) whenever the mouse is moving. This bug report lists a workaround – adding MUTTER_DEBUG_KMS_THREAD_TYPE=user to /etc/environment and rebooting – but in my testing, after suspending and resuming the system, the issue returns and now occurs even without mouse movement.

I tried logging into an Xorg session instead, but discovered that full-screened GPU-accelerated applications exhibited tearing even with vsync enabled (precisely speaking, using VK_PRESENT_MODE_FIFO_KHR in Vulkan).

The bug report above says that the mutter issue doesn’t occur in 24.10, so I researched that release.

Ubuntu 24.10

I haven’t installed this myself, because of reports of periodic instances of the entire display updating at single-digit framerates. This may be the same issue users have reported on recent kernels across multiple distros.

My next steps

I’m considering reinstalling 22.04 and using this PPA to get a newer version of mesa, to see if that resolves the Blender crash. If I test this out, I’ll let people know how it goes.

Your experiences

If any of you have wrestled with some of these issues, have you found a configuration that is working well for you?

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I’ve only tried 24.04, since it’s the latest LTS and officially supported, but don’t have any major GPU related issues.

Do you only have issues when you are using the dGPU directly for the display (using the output on the expansion module itself)? In Linux, I always use the igpu for display and only render or compute on the dGPU, even when docked, so I only need one cable

And what driver are you using? The only thing I’ve done that really went bad was when I tried to use amdgpu-install to get a rocm stack. It installed a dkms version of amdgpu that did not work at all. Desktop performance was awful because the driver wasn’t actually loading at all.

I resolved it by uninstalling all the amdgpu-install packages, returning to the default driver (which works great) and installing rocm packages on their own

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All the issues I’ve described are while using the laptop’s internal display. In testing, the issues don’t seem to be affected by whether I instruct applications to run on the iGPU or the dGPU.

I’m using the open drivers – amdgpu in the kernel, and mesa from the system repos.

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Update: I’ve reinstalled 22.04, added the ppa:kisak/turtle PPA, and upgraded all packages that had newer versions available in the PPA. Blender now runs without crashing, and I’ve seen no other graphical issues like the ones I described in my original post.

I guess I’ll be staying on 22.04 for the foreseeable future, then.