how long will it run on battery?
my FW13 12th gen (debian) lasts maybe 2 hours and even in suspend mode it drains way to fast (/sys/power/mem_sleep = deep)
You are not kidding haha, I saw the article and immediately thought the same. I use a Dell Latitude as my work computer and run it with Linux (Mint). It is a constant struggle between battery life, sleep states (lack of), camera not working, bluetooth not working and whatnot. I still prefer working on Linux than suffering the UX trash that is Windows, but god if there was some paid Linux version that prevented all the necessary tinkering :(
Yea I got a FW a few years ago and regret it. For just a few hundred $$$ more I could've gotten an M1.
The battery situation makes me never use it. Compare to a macbook when I can just close it and open it up weeks later and it just turns on with plenty of charge still left.
Every time I need to use the FW i need to plug it in first or charge it if I want to take it somewhere. Defeats the point of a portable computing device
When I travel with it, i need to make sure I shut it down and not just close the lid, or it discharges and cooks my backpack
I got the FW when I was between jobs so I had a bunch of time to tinker with it and mess around with Linux configs. Now I have a baby and a job so unfortunately my desire to tinker with config is pretty much 0 at this point
From an 11th gen I get about 6 to 7 with light usage, two to three with any development. It's largely a thin client at this point. Battery health is at 92%.
I tried upgrading to the ryzen and when it was good it was really good. I was able to keep a user mode libvirt vm running for dev work and mid brightness under 5W power draw. That used slirp networking, adding a bridge or default nat nic takes up about 2w to 3w of it's own power.
But like most windows laptops the suspend mucked things up. Not even power draw while asleep, but when awaking from sleep the power minimum was 10w with it more often at 20w with similar usage. I tried several wifi cards, nvme drives, port configurations etc. Also tried Fedora, Ubuntu and Nixos.
On Linux this carries over to the discussion of tlp vs power profile daemon, and soon tund. I saw much better performance and regularity with tlp, but that seems like it's not the path forward.
The steam deck shows that suspend can be fixed and done well with decent battery life under linux.
I have a Framework 13 12th gen i5 as well, running NixOS, but I definitely get a lot more than 3 hours! I'm usually running some terminals and Firefox.
I definitely had to play with powertop a bit and remove some programs that consumed a lot of battery (for example, the blueman tray applet had to go). I'd recommend setting powerManagement.enable = true and powerManagement.powertop.enable = true, and letting powertop run in the background while on battery for a few hours to identify the worst offenders.
Sorry, didn't notice the reply; if you let it running for a few while eventually it'll collect enough samples to show you the power consumption of the processes you have running in the terminal UI. Then you just look at the top ones in the list and see if there's a way to reduce power consumption, or quit using them altogether. I haven't used it enough to figure out how the reports work.
As long as you don't use Docker. My last job gave me an M1 Air for container debugging and devops, and it was a comically bad fit for the task. I ended up going back to my cheap x86 Linux host for most of the dirty work, just because it ran cooler.
Now, if someone could find me a native Docker host that lasts all day... then we're in business.
I mainly dev on my home machine, a 13900k linux desktop. When not at home I utilize tailscale to get remote access. Was just in Vegas for a week and it worked great. I plugged my laptop in once to charge.
I have the chromebook, it's great. So easy to do linux stuff. I do wish the cpu scheduler or something related to chromeos could be improved for heavy cpu use. If I run firefox in the linux env, and I open a bunch of tabs, the fan spins up a good amount. It would be soooo much better if there was a way to tell chromeos to use a max amount of resources temporarily, like opening a web browser with lots of tabs. That's my only real complaint, when I overload the system with work.
This AMD config uses s2idle and the battery life very much depends on the usage itself. Ideally, running UMA is going to yield a longer life than say, running from dGPU. For gaming, we have folks using dGPU only as needed. Provides choice.
OOf thats a tough sell, two hours is pretty pathetic. I can't imagine how any laptop maker can be selling a laptop in 2024 with anything shorter than 8 hours and keep a straight face.
This surely has to be a software issue, I can't imagine they'd have been silly enough to fit such a tiny battery!
With 12th Gen, 6-7 hours looks like around what we'd expect for normal, real life usage on Linux. With 13th Gen or Ryzen 7040 Series, we've seen even better, e.g. (though on Windows for this reviewer): https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/review-framework-lap...
My FW13 AMD laptop (61Wh battery) can last 11hr+, technically. If I'm doing anything other than light web browsing, that quickly drops to 8hr. If I'm watching videos, it's more like 5hr.
Unfortunately, at least on Linux, it requires quite a bit of tuning for the moment. But there are some pretty good guides.
Suspend battery life still isn't great, but it's _much_ better (with s2idle supported) on the latest-gen AMD platform.
I previously had the 11th gen Intel and... I got much better battery life than you, but it was still pretty bad.
This is really interesting to me. I too have an 11th gen Intel machine running Arch, and while I get better battery life than 2 hours, it's still the weakest part of the system, and I very rarely put it to sleep, I just turn the whole machine off. Someday I was planning on upgrading to the AMD motherboard, but didn't really see a reason to do so yet, but this might accelerate my plans.
Yeah, sleep on the 11th gen is basically worthless. But the battery upgrade (especially after a few years of wear and tear) and the new AMD board are worth it.
Another data point: my FW13 12th gen, also on Debian, reaches 6 hours. I didn't tune anything other than cap the CPU to 2GHz in order to avoid fan noise.
I would really like to switch from my M1 MacBook to a Framework Laptop, but the battery life difference being almost an order of magnitude makes it a complete non-starter. I like Framework, but this needs to be at the absolute top of their priority list to the exclusion of almost everything else.
It's also a Linux issue that was ignored for years by users and done developers who instead pushed where possible reenabling clunkier older operating modes.
My understanding is that one of the reasons Linux on M-series macs doesn't have the problem is that Asahi team doesn't take similarly crappy attitude.
Also, the issue appears to show up on other 7040 Ryzen laptops, so I hope this finally gets us proper "modern sleep" support instead of instructions to disable it in firmware setup.
> the issue appears to show up on other 7040 Ryzen laptops, so I hope this finally gets us proper "modern sleep" support instead of instructions to disable it in firmware setup.
My ThinkPad has modern sleep support for the 7840U; sleep and wake are nearly instant with very little battery use while sleeping.
Apple's 22 hr rating for the 16" MBP is a maximum for a niche task, it's only (up to) 15 hrs of "wireless web", which is a more typical usage and would only be about 12 hrs worse.
All that configurability of the Framework takes up space, so its battery is 15% less (85 W/h compare to 100 W/h for the MBP).
The MBP has a CPU and instruction set that was optimized for low power from the beginning, compared to x86 which has 40 years of ad-hoc cruft and assumed wall power in the beginning, so it may not even be possible to implement the whole instruction set in low-power. (Intel tried, and did not succeed. Could be BigCO ineffeciencies, but could also be that it just isn't realistic.) But Intel/AMD can't switch architectures like Apple can, because they don't control the software. There's no guarantee that the buyer of a hypothetical improved instruction set Intel CPU has access to a Rosetta program (even if Intel had the imagination to do that). On top of that, Apple has been optimizing that CPU for 15 years, and is has access to the leading node.
Additionally, (presumably because of the lack of legacy cruft) Apple has space on their die for huge caches and the GPU. On-die GPU eliminates power consumption due to an additional discrete component. Large caches also help things go faster, which means the CPU can drop down to low-power mode quicker.
Since Apple owns the CPU, it can customize the CPU for its needs, and it has relentless optimized for low power consumption, even to the extent of putting in a few new instructions for the OS.
Apple owns the OS, so it can have all kinds of power-saving features that a mass-market OS like Windows cannot feasibly implement. It is not in Microsoft's interest to take advantage of every little power savings a motherboard manufacturer might add: extra complexity (= bugs and maintenance costs) with no extra revenue potential. Linux has a similar problem, and additionally there are enough problems needing attention that I expect power optimizations beyond the big ones just do not have the interest / resources. For instance, if a 5% improvement would require a large kernel / driver refactor, I suspect it's a hard sell. Plus, macOS doesn't need to support anywhere near the number of configurations that Linux does, so it probably is less effort to do. So all those 5% increases that Apple can do add up.
Then there is the aspect that Apple can tune its OS for power saving. Update Cocoa to save energy and everyone's app uses less power. I expect GTK and Qt have other more pressing problems. On top of that, I expect Wayland and especially Xorg are not designed with minimal power consumption in mind. Etc, all the way down.
That said, 2.5 hrs does seem like it could definitely be improved.
It's not Linux-branded to be fair (they label it as a "DIY" device that ships with no OS), but yeah.. I'm not really one to deviate too far from the defaults on a device I use for work.
I am using git flow for a project that is around since 2012, I'm pretty much the single developer on said project. gitflow it keeps everything very orderly and I had no issues. Whenever I make a release I have to look up the workflow but that only takes a minute.
Due to the criticism that I came across over the past few years it's unlikely I would use it for a new project though.
Advertising your company on your product is a great way for others to notice your brand. I'm sure the manufacturer of your laptop and phone have done the same.
I got a Framework Intel Gen 12 a couple of months ago. Running Debian with sway window manager. Its the best laptop I ever had apart from bad battery performance.
I used to be a Gamemaster for Tibia. Before that I learned english from playing this game.
This MMORPG was a university project of 4 german students from Regensburg. running on university hardware. Once they finished their studies they had to make a decision to start a company or shut the game down for good. The server was offline for days, if not weeks and the community was anxious about the outcome.
it was such a fun game to play at the beginning because everything was new. for players AND for the guys developing it. you could attack others by aiming with your mouse. so you could attack characters on your screen. but there was no range check, so you could also attack players all the way on the other side of the world if you tweaked the code. also, no cooldown, and no penalty if you aimed at a tile where no player was standing. that means you could have sent an attack command for every single tile on the game world and instantly kill every player/monster around.
Duplicating stuff was possible because the map (including all items lieing around) was saved once at 9:00am ... but your characters inventory was saved whenever you logged off. so before 9:00am you put your amazing and expensive sword on the ground, after the save you pick it up again and log out. now you wait for a server crash, which happened regularly in the early days. (and some might have figured out a way to crash it on purpose) .. after a crash a backup of the map was restored. so you could log in. your sword was on your character but it was also on the ground where you put it at map save time.
me and 3 other people organized a meetup in austria, back around the year 2000 i think. people from all over europe attended. so did the 4 german guys who created the game. out of gratitude for organizing the event we could ask for a special favour. i got a unique weapon, i think one of us got a custom house on Fibula (a tiny island south of thais) ... sidenote: most names from the beginning were latin words stemming from medicine. (Fibula: shinbone, ...)
at some point i started writing my own C++ based bot. some other guy did the hard work and reverse engineered the bits you needed to send to communicate with the server. my bot was able to log in and listen to spoken command from another character that was whitelisted. i could make the bot controlled character walk in any direction.
in the early days my internet was very unreliable, that meant a disconnect during hunting meant you got killed and loose not only 10% of your progress (thats easily 10s, 100s, ... of hours of work) but also loosing all your equipment. afterwards you had to rush to the spot where you died and hope you were the first to pick everything up. without your top equipment on you it happened more than once that I died again, losing another 10% of all your skill points.
learning to deal with frustration and anger on that level was an experience that was as painful as it was life-enhancing.
one more .... the game had containers ... backpacks, boxes, ... naturally you could put packpacks into packpacks into boxes into ... :)
a guy I knew who also did alot of duping in the early days of the game once told me that he had so many items in his "depot" (kind of a bank where you could store stuff savely) that loading his depot content into memory froze the game for seconds when he opened his bank inventory.
another fun bug I just remembered ... the higher your lvl, the faster your avatar could walk. But you could also drag&drop items, monsters and other players around. and you could drag yourself. dragging yourself diagonally didnt have a delay/cooldown in the beginning, so with training or the help of 3rd party software you could move really fast. :)
My signal app simply started crashing on my LineageOS powered phone. Pretty much at the same time the PIN update was rolled out. The app never starts, it always crashes on startup.
