I had some issues building the libfingerprint software under Kubuntu with the normal instructions on the Ubuntu how-to messages posted here; that kinda pushed me to checkout Fedora - which was much easier and even tho you had to jiggle it a little bit, I think anyone could get all features working properly under Fedora.
After, I WAS able to build the libfingerprint under Kubuntu - but I’m really enjoying Fedora so I’m gonna give it a shot at production for 6 months. I like it. Furthermore, I think that Fedora 35 will support the Frame.work even more…
Another thing, I was so worried about that fingerprint and… like always; it sucks anyway. Thats not the frames fault, finger print readers always suck under Linux. You don’t even really need it.
So I have been using Manjaro for a long time and before that Arch. I’ve always used Gnome. For the most part, everything was easy to get working. However I have also tried Pop OS and Ubuntu.
I got into a daily workflow where I will clamshell during the day in a vertical stand and use a dock and grab and go as needed. In this case I was excited to get a thunderbolt 4 dock and play with it. Regardless of which Linux distro I’ve tried none of them have handled clamshell / a thunderbolt dock / suspending well at all.
Sometimes it comes back, other times it doesn’t. Sometimes it comes back and triggers a reboot. Sometimes it will come back but the mouse and keyboard do not work for GDM. However I can switch to a TTY and login but then when I try to sudo it will hang.
The machine will not boot if the thunderbolt dock is plugged in so then you have to open it, unplug, reboot, wait for it to boot, plug the dock back in, hope it lasts through a couple of suspends.
It has been really frustrating so far.
Things seem to work better on Windows (as much as I hate to say it). The machine will still not boot if the dock is plugged in but at least it wakes up more often.
I ended up putting Windows on the internal 2TB SSD and putting Manjaro on the 1TB USB however I wish I didn’t need to.
I’m having another weird error in Manjaro where sometimes the keyboard will stop working when I type and nothing will show, but then every time I click into a text box those characters will be there but they can’t be deleted… It’s so weird.
Anyway this has been my Linux experience so far.
I will say though I had no issues getting anything to work under Manjaro. Bluetooth and the fingerprint reader both work great. The only thing I ended up changing was the fingerprint timeout for sudo before it prompts for a password.
I’m still waiting for my Batch 4 machine, but I’ve decided to install Manjaro Xfce when it arrives.
I’ve used Windows and Linux interchangeably since 2005. From 2005-2008, I used SUSE because it was the only distro that seemed to support my old laptop hardware out-of-the-box. From 2015-2017, I used Arch (really ArchBang). I’ve also used Debian and RHEL on servers. I was playing with a Lubuntu virtual machine for the past couple of years, and I was planning to put that on my Framework, but then I saw people talking about Manjaro. I gave Manjaro a try (both virtual machine and live USB) over the past few weeks and I’m impressed enough to make the switch.
UGH - I read the rest of your post and this kinda stinks… I’ve also thought about a desktop setup but haven’t done anything with it yet. I was thinking a Thunderbolt HUB would work best - but I guess not.
I’m hoping that Fedora 35 continues to support the Frame.work better, and that time will iron out some more of the Frame issues.
Yea it’s been pretty frustrating. I think some of the thunderbolt / wake up issue fixes are going to have to come from BIOS updates. The others seem to be OS specific so they will have to come from Manjaro / Linux fixes.
@Eric_Putney I may end up switching to Gnome too for that as well as some Wayland issues. A shame since I’m liking KDE a lot.
I wonder if there’s a way to amplify that PR. I know it’s waiting on other dependencies, but there’s dozens of us waiting to use the fingerprint reader on our Frameworks under KDE.
I’ve used GalliumOS on Chromebooks in the past, and currently I’m using Brunch (ChromeOS tweaked to run on non-Chromebooks), but when I had to use “other” Linux, I always liked to grab the cmt touchpad configs from ChromeOS/GalliumOS that I think use libgesture? Google put it together and it works amazingly well for most gestures, and honestly the reason I love ChromeOS is they have simpler gestures that work mostly the way you would expect, not 100s of gestures that you can fiddle with to “open left window 2/3 of the screen and hit play…”
Do remember that, in my instance anyway, there’s all this fuss to getting the fingerprinter to work - and when you do get it going… Linux/fingerprint readers don’t exactly work awesome together anyway. I wanted it too, and got it working - but now I’m wanting to disable it fully. Lol. Or ONLY use for unlocking at the Lock Screen. All the sudo fingerprint pop-ups are annoying and slower IMO.
Just a thought - but I know you’ll still want to get it working. Same as me.
pAULIE42o
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/s
Huh I can’t even get sudo to ask for fingerprints (which is fine), I only have lockscreen fingerprints that don’t unlock the keyring. Maybe it’s an Arch/GNOME thing I don’t understand
@Paulie420 That’s honestly probably true. I think it’s more having hardware on my machine that I can’t use. Even if I would end up typing in my password most of the time anyway, haha.
It’s good to know I’m not missing all that much though!
This is likely because your GTK_SCALE or DPI variables or gsettings aren’t set to tell it that you are on a HiDPI screen or the gnome-settings-manager isn’t launching to tell things what to use.
Note they have a mention of things for Wayland (from this section and a little before it).
New Framework user checking in. Just got my machine yesterday and finally had a chance to install today. Pop_OS! 21.04 installed without a hitch – WiFi, Sound, Bluetooth, etc. all work. I y haven’t tried to get the fingerprint reader working, but I’m only mildly interested in that so will probably not bother for a while.
Display – I was worried a little about display scaling but the OS automatically setup HiDPI mode – to my eyes it looks great!
Battery life – no data yet on this but I did a standard install of TLP.
So far I’m super pleased with the machine. Good keyboard feel, awesome screen, and very snappy with a Gen4 NVME drive and 32Gb RAM!
I initially had Ubuntu 21.04 on mine, since my Framework laptop arrived a couple of days before 21.10 was officially released. I noticed that the trackpad would occasionally glitch in 21.04, but an external mouse worked perfectly. When 21.10 was released I did a clean install onto the laptop but this turned out to be a bad move. With 21.10 the entire system occasionally locked up. So I decided to give OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a spin and it works pretty well, after some initial hick-ups. At first I installed it with the GNOME desktop environment, and coming from GNOME 3/Ubuntu 20.04 that I normally use, the newer GNOME 4 interface was a little hard for me to get used to. So I did another fresh install of OpenSUSE, this time using the KDE desktop environment. I think this one is the default for OpenSUSE and it works pretty well. The only gripes I have with OpenSUSE are that I have to type my password FOUR TIMES to get to a fully booted, logged in, and working state. For some reason GRUB is on an encrypted partition so I have to unlock it with my password, then once I select OpenSUSE Tumbleweed from the boot menu I once again have to enter my password to decrypt another partition. Then I enter my password to log in, then I enter it a final time to unlock the keyring/wallet so I can use WiFi networks. But after jumping through those hoops the system is perfectly stable and fast. It was pretty easy to get my preferred C programing environment set up (clang + CLion). And I’m surprised that vanilla minecraft runs so well. I’m getting near 120fps at native resolution with my 1185G7. My SSD is a 2TB 980 Pro and I’ve got 64GB of RAM installed.
As posted above, I’ve been running Pop!_OS so far on my framework, but I just did a test drive of Fedora 35 beta running from a USB drive and boy was it snappy!
Everything worked out of the box, though I did have to enable fractional scaling with a single command line call:
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"
I found that video playback on youtube was smoother and I wasn’t seeing screen tearing issues that were nagging me on Pop_OS.
Once Fedora 35 is officially released I think I’ll be move over to that OS as my daily driver on my Framework.
Thats not the frames fault, finger print readers always suck under Linux. You don’t even really need it.
what’s sad is that it’s been nearly ready all that time