Hello, this might be a bit a stupid question, because this laptop was designed for linux, but as are thinkpads and the last one I got doesn’t work at all with linux. I am thinking about this
So with the AMD Ryzen 7 CPU and with the additional radeon GPU.
I am planning to use probably fedora, but maybe arch. I saw that everything works out of the box on fedora, but what about arch? And if I have some issues with my laptop, what kind of issues ight that be?
Also, in order to save a few bucks I would prefer to buy separate RAM. This is my first computer build, so I don’t really know what to take. From what I understood, the RAM given by framework by default is ddr5 5600 so I suppose that I should take the same. I would like 32Gb I was thinking about this: this. And buy 2 of them. But I don’t know if it’s a good brand or anything, so I would like some help on that. And I would also take some old ssd from another laptop, might that create some issues or a ssd is a ssd? I think it should be fine, but just to make sure. Also, what is the storage expansion card? And the power adapter, it’s the thing that I plug to the socket, or the cable? Because I understood that I charge the laptop with the usb-c port, so any type of usb cable work, the power module is the thing that I connect to the socket. Because 89 dollars seems a lot for this.
Thanks for any kind of help.
Thanks for your answer. I looked at the list of supported memory, and just to confirm this RAM is good to go right? This is a big purchase so I don’t want to make any errors.
Have not tried Fedora, but it seems to be officially supported, so you should be ok with that. There is also official support for Ubuntu as far as i know.
As for Arch, that is not officially supported, but I’m running Endeavouros which is based on Arch, and that runs fine, provided I use a lts kernel.
Some issues may occur depending on what kernel you are using:
I’ve seen some gpu artifacts on recent 6.11 and 6.12 kernels
On some kernels the wifi does not come back after sleep, reloading the driver works as workaround.
Arch’s 6.6.x lts kernel seems to work fine for me, wifi comes back after sleep, hibernate works also fine, and no gpu artifacts. I can even assign the dGPU to a Windows VM and use it for gaming with Looking Glass.
Only issues I have with my FWL16 is that the spacers left and right of the touchpad are not 100% flush with the touchpad. Does not bother me though.
As for the power adapter, your FWL16 will work fine with most 3rd party power adapters, however, to find one with 180W (which is what framework offers) of usb-c power delivery can be challanging. I have a 3rd party power supply with 100W and one with 140W, both will charge the FWL16 just fine (just not as fast as frameworks 180W brick).
And as per documentation by Framework, even the 180W brick may not be able to keep your machine charged under heavy load (Gaming). For full power, you may want to resort to a 240W brick, which framework does not sell, but there are some 3rd party offers nowadays.
I will use fedora after all, but these GPU artefacts are because of the radeon additional GPU, even though it is an AMD? And is the dual GPU well supported, because I know that optimus laptops, so with 2 GPUs but one nvidia linux has some issues. But does it work well with AMD?
My default boot options hide the dGPU from the host, so that i can use it in a VM, and all that seems to work just fine. That means that I run EndeavourOS with KDE on the iGPU, and Windows 11 on the dGPU.
However, normally speaking you would not hide the dGPU, and then you get two entries in /dev/dri for the gpu, and applications can choose for themselves. By default they will typically go to the iGPU, but you can change the preference by setting the DRI_PRIME environment variable to 1 in order to prefer the dGPU.
This should work very seamless, but i have not tried this myself.