I'm a developer and I went from using a MBP to a 12th Gen Framework Laptop with Fedora 37. I like the laptop because it has a better keyboard and better battery life than my old MBP (the battery needs repair after 4 years). What I don't like is that it often freezes for 5-10 seconds because of a bug in Intel's i915 driver (GPU Hang). I'm also a bit unhappy about some Linux applications having bad support for fractional scaling. For some reason I can't see the speed of the CPU fan. Looks like there is no sensor for it. Also the display is a bit wobbly, but overall I'm really happy to leave OS X behind and found a way back to Linux. The touchpad isn't as good as the one I'm used to but I have seen worse ones. I hope that you can upgrade it in the future.
EDIT: Oh and the speakers are bad and the mic sometimes doesn't work after waking up from suspend but I read that there's a fix for it.
Yeah that freezing bug is pretty annoying. I’m running pop 22.04 and I’m overall pleased with the purchase after using it for the last month. I find that I seem to get less of that freeze problem if I don’t put it to sleep, but rather shut it down completely (which also saves battery life). It boots so quickly that I don’t mind.
Great machine overall—if they can fix a few little bugs it will be pretty much perfect.
sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/i915_edp_psr_status
Sink support: yes [0x03]
PSR mode: disabled
PSR sink not reliable: no
I'm on a Framework 12th Gen running Fedora 37, kernel 6.1.9, with no freezes for several weeks after having loads of them under both GNOME and KDE on Ubuntu and pop_OS.
Hey @trynewideas! I already tried the i195.enable_psr=0 kernel boot parameter a month ago but it didn't prevent the freezes. Thanks to your input with the i915_edp_psr_status I now found out that the parameter doesn't have any effect on my system. It just doesn't disable PSR. So I tried to regenerate initramfs with dracut, but still got no effect. I then tried to disable PSR via debugfs as root, but for some reason, I can't write to the file:
[root@fwk ~]# ls -alF /sys/kernel/debug/dri/1/i915_edp_psr_debug
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Feb 15 09:09 /sys/kernel/debug/dri/1/i915_edp_psr_debug
[root@fwk ~]# echo 1 > /sys/kernel/debug/dri/1/i915_edp_psr_debug
-bash: /sys/kernel/debug/dri/1/i915_edp_psr_debug: Operation not permitted
I'm not sure why I'm unable to write. Do you have to mount debugfs differently to do writes or something like that?
EDIT: debugfs is mounted rw and I tried to disable SELinux temporarily with setenforce 0 but I still can't write.
[root@fwk ~]# mount | grep debugfs
debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,seclabel)
[root@fwk ~]# setenforce 0
[root@fwk ~]# sestatus | grep Current
Current mode: permissive
[root@fwk ~]# echo 1 > /sys/kernel/debug/dri/1/i915_edp_psr_debug
-bash: /sys/kernel/debug/dri/1/i915_edp_psr_debug: Operation not permitted
You can try setting `i915.enable_psr=0` at boot (the "add i915.enable_psr=0 into your kernel boot parameters" part of the comment I linked to and posted) or set the enable_psr parameter on the i915 kernel module.
The Fedora docs cover setting module parameters.[1] This is how setting the kernel module parameter manifests on my system:
$ sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/1/i915_edp_psr_status
Sink support: yes [0x03]
PSR mode: disabled
PSR sink not reliable: no
I'd raise a proper support request[1] with Framework then, who are generally more responsive and thorough with these kinds of problems than most laptop tech support (they put me down this path to start with).
Not trying to stir anything here but this review makes me not want it at all. What made you keep it instead of buying a $40 battery replacement for your MacBook if nothing seems to work as well?
I originally come from a Linux and FreeBSD background. I'm used to having to tweak my OS until everything works and looks and feels the way I want it to be. I started using OS X around ten years ago because I needed things like XCode for work. I like how easy it is to use OS X but at the same time I really despise the closed nature of the OS. What also bugged me is the planned obsolescence of the hardware. My MBP's keyboard started to become awful really quick. Now many keys trigger multiple times and some sometimes not at all. Sometimes I have to type my password five or six times (I'm not a fingerprint guy). What I really like about the Framework laptop is that it is designed to be repairable and upgradeable. I don't want to change my laptop every four or five years if possible. I want to be able to replace its mainboard or the keyboard or the display. I now use the Framework every day for work and I'm not less productive than on OS X. At the same time I believe that all issues will be gone eventually.
EDIT: Oh and the speakers are bad and the mic sometimes doesn't work after waking up from suspend but I read that there's a fix for it.