Framework Laptop 16

T

tingo

They haven't opened orders for my country (Norway) yet, but I'm already a bit exited about the Framework Laptop 16. They main attraction for me (in addition to being user customizable) is that I can get it with an AMD cpu. For some reason I prefer AMD CPUs. See also Introducing the Framework Laptop 16.
I only hope I have enough money to buy one.

Of course I'm going to run (at least try) FreeBSD on it!

Is anyone else planning to buy one?
 
Hello, fellow Norwegian!

The Framework computers are an exciting concept, although I believe I read the newer ones don't necessarily play nice with FreeBSD yet. Interested to hear about others' experiences with the Framework laptops.

I don't see any of them listed on this page yet, but maybe there's some other overview page I should be looking at?

 
I'm watching, but biding my time. Pre-orders for the 16" version have just opened for "all of our current countries: US, Canada, Germany, France, UK, Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, and Australia". These are for delivery in Q4 of calendar 2023.
 
I have an 11th gen:
forums.freebsd.org

Frame.work laptop

Just got mine. First the good news. Freebsd 12.2 installs on it flawlessly and yields a text-mode system that is as stable as I've come to expect from Freebsd. However, I found no way of getting the Iris Xe graphics that come with the Intel chip to give me any sort of X screen. I tried drm-kmod...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

cmoerz has a 12th gen:
forums.freebsd.org

Frame.work notebook, 12th gen Intel

For anyone, who's thinking about buying - I'm documenting my experiences/pains... UEFI boot+install works out of the box w/ 13.1 X11 does not work, unless switching to vesa framebuffer (I'll post later, how I got it running), don't bother installing kmod, because it appears we're SOL with Alder...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
I even got an 11th gen, because I downgraded. 12th gen simply isn't ready for FreeBSD (or vice versa) yet because of graphics/drm-kmod. Once 14.0 is out, there's a chance it will become useful.

On a positive side note - if you update your BIOS with the most recent 11th gen version, you get a tremendous battery runtime boost. At least for me, I managed to go from 4.5 to around 7-8 hours on 80% charge, which is sufficient to get you through the day.

I can't speak for the graphics support on the AMD cpus and I don't feel like buying yet another device that'll stay shelved until maybe 15.0 or later - even though I wouldn't mind supporting frame.work for their amazing work and open architecture. So, I'd recommend letting others buy it first and get some lspci/pciconf listings to understand what will work and what not.

For me, the 11th gen works in full on the level that my x270 did its job before. Anything that keeps breaking will drive you nuts and might even bring with it misplaced resentment. Mobile hardware is simply outpacing FreeBSD's development capacity for the moment and I expect it won't change anytime soon.

My experience probably won't help you much, unfortunately - as you are interested in the larger model. There won't be any "older" CPUs/GPUs available for that.
 
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