I've been running NixOS on my Framework for the last few months, and I've been really happy with it. I initially got it so I'd have viable hardware to do osdev on, so learning that they are going to open-source its firmware makes me even more happy.
Seems too good to be true. Reasonable prices, upgradable, no soldered ram. So has it been a reliable Linux laptop, what's the battery life with your options?
You nailed it, battery is the only downside I’ve had, not awful but probably say 3 hours of video playback, or 5-6 hours of web use. Haven’t used it unplugged all that much so very rough guesses. Bigger problem with my fedora install at least is battery draining while the lid is closed.
Overall great machine
Edit: I may be missing software updates that improve this, no idea
I very much wanted to hear about this and damn :-(
Video playback must be hardware accelerated by now and be super efficient. Another worry was about low power sleep modes and waking up, and looks like it is not solved too. I might have to suck it up and buy the Mac for my needs after all. I have my trusty Linux desktop for all my big compute needs. I was hoping to make the mobile machine also run Linux, but the specific needs there (crisp display, nice battery life, Linux friendliness) seems to be an elusive goal.
It's still a real pain to get hardware accelerated video in a browser on Linux. Google is still outright refusing to support it in chromium, even though they do support it inside Chrome OS. There are few community patches floating around if you're willing to roll your own chromium to enable to Chrome OS hardware decode pathways on generic Linux.
You can mostly get it working on Firefox if you play around with the config options, but it only works with AMD and Intel GPUs (anything supporting vaapi).
As a heads up they fixed the intel xe graphics sandboxing issue in firefox 96. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698778 It works great on my Framework with NixOS. My about:config settings (taken from my home-manager):
The M1 MacBook Air honestly feels so far ahead of any other laptop I've used that it's not even funny. Fanless, powerful, absolutely bonkers battery life.
There's some concerns about paravirtualized GPU performance, but the equivalent of "sports car" (workstation/server-like workloads) runs in VMs in cloud providers all the time.
That is untrue for native arm apps. The OS actually requires signing. If you are running an x86 app through Rosetta you can currently avoid code signing requirement.
I've been using a Framework laptop for a month on Ubuntu 21.10 and pretty happy with it. Some hiccups but mostly answered by digging through forums.
Battery life in operation is excellent, but it does drain 30% in 8 hours when on suspend which is a bit much. Not a dealbreaker but hope this can be solved.
High battery drain during standby on Linux can be due to the system not entering the proper sleep state. I had this happen to me on an AMD machine lately, in that case disabling secure boot solved the issue.
Here is a pretty detailed blog post in checking if that is the problem and how to deal with it on intel systems
Out of my element here, but would be curious to see if this is something solvable in firmware (now open-sourced!) or if it's a hardware problem to begin with (power states? etc).
Edit: Also curious if this issue is generally a hardware or firmware issue in most laptops, or if it's a mix of both.
Could be caused by Modern Standby (by default newer laptops remain on even when nominally off, which has been known to cause issues). Some more details here:
The problem is that current Intel laptops don't use S3 anymore, they use S0ix a.k.a. "modern standby", an abomination where the CPU doesn't really sleep and the battery drains fast.
I have a Thinkpad X1 from 2018 and by default it came with S0ix enabled and Lenovo later on added the S3 sleep state option through a BIOS update, called "Linux compatibility something".. Before that, one had to manually edit the DSD table to get rid of this evil burning-sleeping-laptop-in-backpack-feature called S0ix.
Does the Framework Laptop, or other popular models from the other manfacturers you mentioned, not have a S3 sleep state option these days, i.e. S0ix only?
S0ix has stronger requirements on the "correct" interaction between firmware/BIOS and OS, it offloads more work to the OS. Poorly implemented S0ix will drain the battery faster, but correctly implemented S0ix is as good as S3 or even better.
Lenovo put out a buggy S3 implementation on some systems that hasn't been tested well because it's only an optional "Linux suspend" setting. Drains twice as fast as Linux with correctly implemented S0ix. And the worst thing is, nobody except Lenovo do can fix it because it's all on the BIOS level, and their China-based firmware team has other priorities.
Well-implemented S3 is nice. But it's going to disappear. Both Intel and AMD are switching away with full force, vendors won't have S3 options in the BIOS going forward and the ones that remain will likely suck. On the other hand, S0ix support is coming together even on AMD platforms which were a little late to the party. Once it's working decently, I'd rather trust my OS than my laptop manufacturer's firmware team to suspend components correctly.
Battery life on mine with a pretty minimal Arch install and TTY is around 10 hours when doing light web browsing and programming. Only problems I’ve had are hardware related. The trackpad isn’t 100% reliable (sometimes clicks don’t work and I have to press hard to get it to work again) and the hinge is far too loose. Love the laptop overall.
From what I've heard battery life is much worse on Linux than Windows. If you're willing to spend some time hacking around you can close the gap a bit, but it'll still be a gap.
Personally I can't confirm this. I've recently replaced the battery on my 2014 Thinkpad, and on low brightness I get around 8h of battery. That is of course, while not doing a lot of compute (compiling).
I don't think this was much higher, back when I used Windows all those years ago, so I'm not sure what people are saying with low battery with Linux? I don't see how Windows could get me much more? And why would it?
If you have a Thinkpad, then the issues with the Framework (CPU sleep states, needing to turn of secure boot to hibernate properly, power management issues in Framework BIOS 3.06, etc) wouldn't necessarily apply to your laptop
I haven't run Windows in my Framework laptop so I can't really say if there's a difference but the issue in Linux was mostly because deep sleep wasn't enabled for some distros.
Having come from Debian, Ubuntu, and Manjaro I settled on what feels like the last distro I will use on my own systems: NixOS. It's not so much better, it's so much different.
Every(ish) single package, every single line of configuration(ish) is under version control in a(couple) nix files. I share (most) of it between my systems. With flakes (and it's lockfile) it's a 100%(ish) deterministic system.
Downside: The language is arcane to me and the tooling is dogshit. Not that I could've made it any better, but running my config repo through entre to rebuild on every write to get some promiscuous error nobody has had before sucks major D.
Therefore I still have an Ubuntu container (because every desktop application targets Ubuntu) running with X11 forwarding for the few packages that aren't in nixpkgs that I wanna run.
I also don't use home-manager, but chezmoi for my dotfiles. Since I want my home configuration to work on MacOS and other distros I might SSH.
Atomic upgrades and downgrades are such a great feature I don't know how people can live without it now that I've experienced it.
Note: The default configuration NixOS gives you is also shit, out of the box they don't ship a system like you'd want to consume it (nixos-generate-config). An anecdotal example is that Avahi isn't installed by default, which means chromecasting won't work until you figure out that you need Avahi, i18n config is shit too.
So it's not all green grass, but definitely worth it, since every Nix line you write is an investment into making your experience better "forever" (I don't see NixOS going away anytime soon, very healthy activity on the project).
Now after praising NixOS for awhile, let's praise the developers of all packages that are compiled into the lovely distros you all use. For me the KDE team can't get enough praise, the software is so damn good.
> I also don't use home-manager, but chezmoi for my dotfiles. Since I want my home configuration to work on MacOS and other distros I might SSH.
FYI, home manager works on MacOS just fine. I usually tell people to start with Home Manager as I think it's the best gateway drug to Nix stuff at the moment.
Just wanted to echo all of this. I started with home-manager and then moved to NixOS over the holiday. It’s really been great: easy to set up, relatively easy to configure most things, and it’s so lovely to know that the changes I make are checked into version control for easy use across machines.
Same here. Over the holidays I first tried NixOS in a VM and really liked it. I had a lot of fun setting up the system. A week later I installed it as my main OS and is has been great so far
The screen is very low-res and the GPU is weak. This is why I don't have one.
If you don't care about pixels (seems common in PC-land), this is probably a good thing re: power consumption.
I look at text all day, every day, and want it to be high res. It's been high res on my Macs for half a decade, and my XPS is even better. I'll get one of these once they fix the screen.
Especially on a 13" screen. I have an XPS 13 with a 4k screen and I never use it at native resolution undocked because I'd need a magnifying glass to read anything on it.
That's been the unfortunate part: "do you want 4K or 1080?" has been the question for the longest part without consideration that many people want something in between--hiDPI without going into sizing where you can't tell the different. I have only had 4K screens (15", 14", & 13") since 2015 and can't handle 1080, but I don't want the wasted battery from 4K on smaller sizes.
Once you get used to 220+ ppi, it's very difficult to go back.
I even don't like my 218ppi displays that much, they are a little fuzzy compared to my 300+ ppi displays.
It's not a matter of opinion what is "low" or "high" when dealing with integers for resolution. It's evident that you think a low-res (by 2022 market options) display is sufficient. That's fine, but it doesn't make it high res.
There are people who think an analog serial console with 24 lines and 80 columns is sufficient resolution for text. That's not what's being discussed: simply the resolution of the display in the computer. It's low by modern laptop standards.
Exact same boat here - got my Framework a couple months ago when my Thinkpad X230 finally started showing its age, installed NixOS on it. The only disappointments so far have been battery life and heat management. I get maybe 5-6 hours from full charge, and the laptop gets super hot/noisy when sitting on anything other than a hard flat surface where the fans get maximum airflow (even using it when it's on my lap gets uncomfortable quick, and putting it on top of a blanket is out of the question).
I'm curious what the build quality is like. I've heard some complaints about QA and reliability issues with the hardware, but I don't know anyone in person who owns one of these devices. What has your experience been like?
I haven't had any hardware issues tbh. The only thing I would say is that the fans kick in pretty loud when doing anything remotely intensive. Even battery life has been fine, compared to my old Macbook Air. I've had to put in some work configuring drivers, since they're so new that they haven't landed in the distros yet. But NixOS makes that easy, so that's about it.
