Frame.work

This are my own impressions from the Frame.work laptop. I will not repeat what you can read somewhere else or watch in lots of intro videos. As a Debian developer I have a strong focus on installing and running Debian.

Shipping

To fulfil promise to be environment friendly everything was wrapped in paperboard. No plastic wrapping was used which I liked a lot. I personally care for saving the environment which was a major reason to replace my nine year old Thinkpad T440s by the Frame.work with the expectation to keep it at least that time.

Assembling DIY edition

I'm not very experienced with laptop hardware internals. However, adding the memory and SSD was really easy. It took me about 15min. A very nice experience even for bloody beginners, IMHO.

Debian installation

I installed Debian 11.2 which was the latest stable release of Debian at that time. The overall installation went smoothly without any problem from the hardware side. Unfortunately there was an issue with the installer itself: If the hibernation feature is intended the swap size should not be less than the size of physical memory. Since I failed to check this in the partitioning step I had to re-install later again.

Impression of the laptop when working

I can simply confirm that the positive evaluations of the hardware I have read are fitting my impression. I like the keyboard and the display a lot. The shape of the laptop is nice and its very handy.

There is one real drawback: When doing editing or browsing the laptop is silent. However, when you start complex operations, say building a heavy Debian package or doing calculations with some effort the fan makes quite some noise. You can hear that even when sitting a couple of metres away. So if you are seeking a really silent laptop under all conditions this is possibly not for you.

It also needs to be mention that the battery is not very long lasting. I was aware about this before buying. The reason was given by the design as replaceable as possible. So if the battery should be easily replaceable it can not have a design filling the smallest niche. This is OK for me since I realised that I have access to power on most places where I am, also in the trains I'm using. For really long travels I might consider a power bank to recharge the battery. BTW, charging can be done via any of the USB 3C ports. I configured one USB 3C extensions so I can charge the laptop from both sides.

In addition I have an USB 3 extension and one Mini-SD extension. I admit I'm really hoping for a normal SD card extension which I could use to read the SD cards from my camera which I'm using quite frequently.

Support

I somehow had some trouble with the Mini-SD card extension. It somehow did not detected when I inserted a card. Dmesg didn't report anything when I injected a card. Thus I wrote an e-mail to the support. Answers were prompt, very kind and helpful. After some e-mail exchanges I received a new extension.

There is also great support from the community. Its astonishing that this very young product has obviously quite some number of users who are very competently helping in case of issues.

I contacted the community to solve 3 problems:

Hibernation: As mentioned above my first installation went with to small swap space. This was sorted out quickly and I re-installed with a properly sized swap space.
Three finger gesture: It turned out that the three finger gesture to use paste of the X buffer does not work. I just learned that under xfce which I'm using this is simply by touching where a middle mouse button would be expected - right in the middle of the lower part of the touchpad.
Power consumption on suspend: As mention above battery life time is not extraordinary. However, I realised that even in suspend mode quote some battery is drained - way more than a comparable laptop I have access to. I've got quick and competent help and will explain how to enhance the situation to an acceptable level below.

Fine tuning

To reduce the battery consumption I had to do some adjustments.


sudo apt install powertop
sudo powertop --auto-tune

helped a lot. BTW, the recommendation to suspend-then-hibernate via


--- a/systemd/logind.conf
+++ b/systemd/logind.conf
@@ -32,6 +32,9 @@
 #HandleHibernateKeyLongPress=ignore
 #HandleLidSwitch=suspend
 #HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=suspend
+HandleLidSwitch=suspend-then-hibernate
+HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=suspend-then-hibernate
+IdleAction=suspend-then-hibernate
 #HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore
 #PowerKeyIgnoreInhibited=no
 #SuspendKeyIgnoreInhibited=no

did not work.

External devices

The Frame.work is the first laptop where I successfully managed to get external Bluetooth speakers working (I never got this working with any other laptop.)

Connecting to my TV set with USB 3C went smoothly including sound. On other laptops I've got the screen working but not the sound. This worked out of the box.

Yet unsolved problem which possibly affects only me

As mentioned in the section "Support" I have some issue with the three finger gesture. Call me old-fashioned but I'm very used to xfce4 where I'm using plain xterm as terminal. After the first installation the three finger gesture to paste the X buffer worked without any extra configuration. Right after the installation I've moved to Debian testing which is what I'm usually running and I'm updating it quite frequently (mostly daily). At some point in time suddenly the three finger gesture stopped working. At this time I intended to re-install the laptop to extend the swap space anyway. Thus I did not cared much and assumed it might work again after re-installation.

Unfortunately the three finger gesture did not worked again. I confirm it works nicely if I test it under Gnome desktop - so in principle this is probably not an actual problem of the frame.work laptop. On the other hand I have the very same configuration on some other laptop where everything is fine.

Of course xfce4-terminal with the <Ctrl>C-<Ctrl>V cut-n-paste mechanism works fine and if you are not as stubborn as I am to stick to xterm everything is fine.

Wernigerode, December 2022