*best here referring to battery life, hardware compatibility and functionality, etc.
As the title suggests, I’m trying to determine under which OS the Framework Laptop appears to perform the best.
I’ve seen A LOT of Linux activity on here and so I’m hoping to get some pretty good responses to this thread. Please remember to specify the details of the distro you are using (Fedora 34 respin, for example).
My experience, to date, is with Windows.
My observations are thus:
Run time: 5-7 hours battery life (browser (20 tabs, 14 open), 2 chat clients (Rocket Chat and Gajim/Dino), music player (musicbee), Outlook, putty, VNC viewer, VmWare Workstation 16 Pro (all vm’s suspended), Steam (all download prevented until a specific time), and WSL2 (display brightness set to 15%, best battery profile selected, and turbo boost manually disabled in Windows under the power profile. Performance is still fantastic with these settings.)
Hardware: all hardware functions as intended.
Standby time: ~1 hour max at S0 levels before hitting hibernation. Anything beyond an hour, means you will have lost AT least 5% battery.
Based on these observations, the ONLY place I think Linux can do better is in standby times. (please don’t misinterpret this. I’m not bashing Linux. I’m talking merely about pure performance and battery life here. NOTHING else.) So what are you all seeing? I still have a module ssd card (250gb) I want to install a Linux distro on, and your responses here will be really helpful in determining which one I should go with.
Astonishing fact, you go with OS which you feel comfortable with…
I feel comfortable with a shell with me, so I can quickly control things, take screenshots, add anything to clipboard, quickly switch between apps (LOF script from octetz), flex sometimes xD (not much), do bulk operations, etc… Also a stable and light GNU C/C++ compiler unlike too heavy visual studio which takes 5+ GB just on download. Update apps on fly with one or two (including flatpack) command(s)… Also a lot of useful scripts ready to execute for common tasks like some quick math, cloc for git repo, a passwd generator, a music downloader based off ytdl, etc.
You should know what you’re doing and select wisely yourself instead of suggestions Framework gonna have full support with linux I guess, they’ve said they’re merging fingerprint reader with libfprint as well, should have no problem going with both.
Astonishing that you respond with nothing beneficial to the thread in question, and at the same time ASSUME you know what I know about using Windows or computers in general.
This thread is NOT a Windows is better than Linux or Linux is better than Windows conversation. There are cases for both of those, and they’re not relevant to this thread.
Apologies if I was not calm, English is not my primary language so sometimes it happens .
Astonishing fact, you go with OS which you feel comfortable with…
should have no problem going with both.
As I said, you can work with both, the support is the same, it just depends on what you will be doing, if you are more on games / photography you’ll prefer windows, if you have requirements of say doing work quick maybe linux be good for you
Windows is going to be better (easier) for now. Give it a bit of time for there to be some kernel updates and polishing and linux will probably reach parity or surpass it depending on workloads.
I don’t have anything of real substance to contribute, but I had to say that I’m astounded by the out of the box functionality of Ubuntu 21.04. I get very close to the same sort of numbers in the original post, but I think (think) that the standby/hibernation is a bit better. Nothing that I would suggest changing OSs for.
Ooh I’m excited to hear about the Ubuntu 21.04! I haven’t ventured much off windows like I had originally planned, but it was mostly fear of what the battery life would be
@Nick_Martin It isn’t exactly Ubuntu, but on Linux Mint XFCE (kernel upgraded to 5.11, easy to do with GUI but needs a wired web connection to do simply) with the only optimization being default settings for TLP, all hardware except fingerprint scanner just works (and the scanner apparently can be compiled but haven’t felt the need), and I’ve found consistent battery life in the ~10 hour range with web browsing, reading papers, and playing music. This seems to be a decent bit more than people are reporting on Ubuntu, and honestly I have no idea why, but I’ll take it…
@A_L@Nick_Martin for maximum battery life I’d probably suggest going with a window manager (i3wm/bspwm/herbstluftwm/awesomewm/dwm) instead of full desktop environment. It’ll consume only the resources you’ll tell them to. Battery backup can go from 1.2x upto 2x from a DE, and you can customize it fully for a productive environment.
I’m having easy time with herbstluftwm, I’m finding it easier and more modular than bspwm (my last favourate wm). It has modular monitor split system independent of screen size, operates frame as a binary tree within each workspace (called tag), and each frame can have as many as window as an array with a static layout algorithm (vert/horiz/max/grid). Frames also support to move window from one to another frame. Configured with bash script so no new programming language is required beforehand.
Easy to make frames with simple Mod + {O,U} for horizontal/vertical split, remove with Mod + R, and moving/resizing/focus windows with simple keybind as explained in the tree diagram Tutorial#Tiling - herbstluftwm.
Give it a shot, even if you are new to it. Its dead simple! RAM consumption of about 140MB including 10 opened shells & a few services.
Eww widgets also started supporting bar (which can have scroll/click events unlike the static polybar), so I’m gonna take a moment back and convert these polybar-themes to eww widgets as well. With rofi as an app launcher or file finder you probably could get a fully functional desktop.
It probably can run off in 300-350MB ram usage and a fully fledged working desktop experience (you can have more services enabled if you like)!
Came to this thread from a search. What I was looking for is “What OS is fully supported” Drivers, touchpad, fingerprint reader, everything…
I’m not trying to get into a debate on Windows vs Linux, I am fluent in either and can make either work for me (especially with WSL2) I just want what is supported as my base system without having to spend all my time searching or compiling things to get it to work.
I’ve read a lot about and have pre-downloaded the win driver set and have been following Ubuntu (I prefer Kubuntu but that’s just a ‘face’ to the os) threads that look promising.
@nrp , assistance plz if you get a chance. If I’m not finding the right thread, I apologize ahead of time.
I believe at this point, the audio driver notwithstanding, Windows supports the hardware the best. However, I doubt this is going to stand for forever. The community will eventually catch up, and it’ll be great.
My plan is to just keep using Windows, and when we finally get the WSLg update from a Windows update, I’ll be good. In the meantime I’m running Ubuntu in a VM.
Although when Ubuntu LTS or Fedora 34 officially support the laptop (out of the box, without any work around and manual updating) I’ll probably switch proper and run Windows in a VM.
Everything works on Windows. There is a small bug in the audio driver which seems to cause the laptop to loose 5% in standby faster than expected, which causes it to then hibernate. You can uninstall the realtek audio driver, and windows will use the default driver for it, which seems to work better during standby and sleep.
Framework is hard at work getting an update to the firmware out, and hopefully realtek will be able to provide a driver update soon as well.
However, in the meantime things are fully functional on Windows.(as everything works as intended, and we are just hoping for improvements from fine tweaking of software.)
Framework gonna have full support with linux I guess, they’ve said they’re merging fingerprint reader with libfprint as well, should have no problem going with both.
