[Discuss] Framework 13 keyb(Was Linux backups)

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 12/13/24 12:07 PM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> I am in the process of moving my home directory to a new laptop > (framework) and retiring my tower.
It has been a few months since I got my Framework 13, an AMD Ryzen 
model, thought people might be interested in how it is going.

Spoiler: I like it, I am glad I chose it, but it is very much not perfect.

The over all approach of being so modular is good. I could afford far 
more RAM than I could otherwise, I have already had occasion to swap 
SSDs.? At some point I'll get a bigger SSD. For the four expansion ports 
I bought four USB-C modules, and am using them most, but I also have a 
USB-A and a micro SD module, they are occasionally nice to have.

I expect there will be multi-function expansion modules in the future, 
say, two USB-C jacks.

The four USB-C expansion holes are picky, they don't all do everything, 
some cables that used to work on my old XPS-13 don't on this, the power 
supply that used to work on my XPS-13 doesn't quite work on this. 
Though, as I check now, all four *do* seem to work for power. Maybe 
Trixie has some advantages after all.

And old Asus portable monitor, that is a single USB-C for power and 
video, only works on two of the four ports. I haven't tried a 
self-powered monitor, yet. Sounds like my problems with the expansion 
ports being picky is not just my unit, others report similar problems. 
But four ports that are a bit picky is still better than just one or two 
ports.

I feared being easy to open would make it more fragile than other 
laptops, but it seems quite sturdy.

I have run stable Debian 12, and am now on testing for Debian 13. The 
SSD I bought (same model as they sell, but not from Framework) had a 
defect that makes waking from sleep take an extra half-minute. Replacing 
it was the fix, but I also moved to Debian testing (Trixie) as part of 
figuring it out. Trixie seems so far a lot like 12 (Bookworm) though at 
some point waking from hibernation broke. I haven't tracked it down 
because with sleep working, the need isn't so great. And who knows, they 
might have already fixed it and I don't know yet.

Power consumption when I am not doing much seems too high, maybe this 
will improve by the time I might have occasion to need lots of battery life.

The lack of dedicated page up, down, home, and end keys is annoying. 
This isn't the fault of Framework specifically, it seems to be an 
industry-wide conspiracy. I hate needing two hands to just scroll 
through things. My workaround is some key remapping software to make 
caps lock be a sticky way to turn the arrow keys into their secondary 
functions. Not perfect when I forget I have it on, and don't notice the 
LED, things will be funny until I hit the caps lock again.

Debian defaults to turning the 2256x1504 display into I think a 1128x752 
display, which is silly, but running it at 1-to-1, which I am doing, is 
a bit hard on the eyes, too. At some point I'll probably switch to 
1920x1200.

I have a problem with the trackpad sticking, there is a adjustment that 
is reportedly pretty easy, but I haven't gotten around to it.

As with more than one of my previous laptops, there is an annoying 
problem of it not staying asleep when I put it to sleep. I'm told this 
is because ACPI is a godawful mess. The setting to sleep when the lid is 
closed seems to only respond to the *event* of the lid closing and pays 
no attention to the *state* of the lid being shut. And when it is shut, 
there apparently are things that will wake the computer, and then it 
stays awake, burning down the battery, getting hot. My solution was to 
write a little Rust program, sleep-dammit, that looks at the lid state. 
If it is closed it tells the computer to sleep. The program then does a 
thread sleep for a few seconds??to avoid any cases of bugs in my code 
and aggressive narcolepsy being impossible to interrupt. Mostly I do not 
want to sleep when the lid is closed, but before I fly on a plane I open 
a new terminal and run sleep-dammit there.

This Framework 13 is a noticeably bigger and heavier than my previous 
XPS-13 (a several year old model, the last good one they made, I say). 
About the same width, a tad thicker, but mostly a lot deeper (that is, 
taller screen when open). I think I would like it smaller, but at least 
I am not forced to buy a big 16-inch-ish monster. The Framework 13 is 
kind of usable in a cheap airplane seat.

They keys are farther apart than they were on my XPS-13. It is the 
XPS-13 that was non-standard, but my fingers still needed to adjust.

When I had a recent Mac from work I found the front edge, under my 
palms, to be annoyingly sharp. (They expect everyone to have an external 
keyboard for most use?) The Framework 13 made a similar design decision, 
but with a somewhat larger corner radius, and not annoying.

I am running MATE desktop (if that matters), and some battery software 
likes to report that the power is disconnected, when it isn't, the pilot 
light indicating it is plugged in and charged is lit. Oh, and the 
reported expected battery life is tree or four digits worth of hours. It 
did this on Debian stable, too. Mildly annoying, as the notification 
interrupts me and takes up screen space.

There are hard switches for the camera and mic, which is good. But 
oddly, they each show red when the camera or mic is shut off, when I 
think of being "on" as more dangerous and worthy of red, they seem to 
think "off" is what should be red. Bad UI to be so ambiguous.


A nice machine, and one that I expect will get better with age.


-kb