The Framework Laptop 16 is my new laptop of choice that I purchased to replace my dying older machine. It is a sweet machine with phenomenal Linux support, but like all machines, it still has a set of things to know about when using Linux - this time, not really due to broken hardware/firmware, but due to things like high-dpi displays being in a beta state on the Linux desktop.
This might be useful for people who stumble onto this gist to debug. My laptop is configured as such, with notes on the Linux support:
- CPU - AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS
- GPU - Integrated UMA graphics (AMD Radeon 780M)
- RAM - Kingston 32 GB kit (2x16), 5600 MT/s, CL40 SODIMM memory
- SSD - SK Hynix P41 Platinum NVMe 4x4 m.2 2280 format, 2 TB
- Beware: This disk does not report its size to
udisks, so the size shows up as "Unknown" everywhere. Purely a cosmetic issue: your partition size is known, and the installer has no problem setting up partitions on this disk. - You cannot run a SMART self-test through GNOME Disks on this disk using GNOME Disks, but you can indeed read the SMART table using
smartctl -a /dev/nvme0. - The disk runs cool and sips battery, suggesting its sleep states are working well under Linux.
- You cannot upgrade the firmware of this disk through LVFS, unlike the Solidgm P44 Pro which was, however, much more expensive in my situation. You need a Windows partition or other hacks - I am personally not bothering updating the firmware.
- Beware: This disk does not report its size to
I chose Fedora Workstation 40 because it's officially support and it's a sweet development environment all in all - podman and toolbox are nice to work with, dnf + gdb integration, easy-to-install debug symbols for all packages to help debug upstream, and great support for all on-board hardware as well as nice support for multi-touch gestures are a compelling package.
Flathub is the accepted central repository to download Flatpak applications through. Flatpak is the next-generation container-based, distro-agnostic, arbitrarily sandboxed packaging system for GUI applications. It provides a host of important advantages over traditional packaging, except for applications like software development, so I recommend using it for most software you install - especially proprietary commercial software, which benefits greatly from the stable and tested runtime target.
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepoBy default, all codecs and haerdware video acceleration are not configured, although they work splendidly with the onboard AMD platform. This is easily remedied with RPMFusion. These instructions may be out of date if a lot of time has passed - refer to upstream website to double check.
First, add both the free and non-free repos:
sudo dnf -y install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm && \
sudo dnf -y config-manager --enable fedora-cisco-openh264 && \
sudo dnf -y groupupdate core # Entries in GNOME-SoftwareNext, swap ffmpeg-free for full-fledged ffmpeg:
sudo dnf -y swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasingNext, install the codecs:
sudo dnf -y groupupdate multimedia --setopt="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin && \
sudo dnf -y groupupdate sound-and-videoFinally, install the patched mesa drivers to take advantage of these codecs for hardware acceleration, keeping in mind this will require a reboot to work:
sudo dnf -y swap mesa-va-drivers mesa-va-drivers-freeworld && \
sudo dnf -y swap mesa-vdpau-drivers mesa-vdpau-drivers-freeworld && \
sudo dnf -y swap mesa-va-drivers.i686 mesa-va-drivers-freeworld.i686 && \
sudo dnf -y swap mesa-vdpau-drivers.i686 mesa-vdpau-drivers-freeworld.i686The internal speakers are widely considered to be the not-so-high point of this laptop. However, Framework Forums user cab released a very nice profile to load in EasyEffects to vastly improve the sound that comes out of the speakers.
To apply it:
- Download the preset JSON and save it somewhere
- Install EasyEffects, either through Flatpak or DNF. I went with the native package on this one
- Click on "Presets", then the "Folder" icon, and find the profile file.
- Click on "Pipewire", "Presets Autoloading". Choose "Family 17th/19th HD Audio Controller Analog Stereo" from the "Device" dropdown, and add the profile you imported earlier.
- Click on the hambuger menu, Preferences, and enable "Launch Service at System Startup"
- Reboot the computer.
Next boot, the speakers will sound much better, and will also have more accurate reproduction of high and low frequencies. The only caveat is that this causes a bit of delay. You might hear a slight artifact at the beginning of things like notification sounds. It is for you to decide whether this is worth it. This solution is a stop-gap until official support for laptop speaker DSP lands into Pipewire directly.
This laptop supports and enables the AMD-pstate EPP CPU scaling driver by default, in a tested way and without requiring to forcibly enable it. However, I have found a great improvement in battery life and heat produced by this mobile workstation by setting the EnergyPerformancePreference from balance_performance to balance_power, which sits in between how power-profiles-daemon sets it upon entering the balanced and power-save profiles.
For a fast way of configuring this driver without having to cat and tee to sysfs manually, I recommend using the excellent amd-epp-tool, installing it following the instructions on the repo, and then using it to set:
ScalingGovernor=powersaveEnergyPerformancePreference=balance_power
This is already default on battery. Do this any time you are on AC and you feel the laptop is overheating.
As of Linux kernel 6.9, AMD added the equivalent of Windows feature AMD Vari-Bright to Linux. It is a power saving feature that reduces the contrast and brightness of the panel when on battery and especially when using a power-saving setting in order to preserve battery. It makes the display colours very inaccurate and unpleasant to look at when the laptop is being used on battery.
To revert this, add the amdgpu.abmlevel=0 parameter to the kernel:
grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="amdgpu.abmlevel=0"This laptop comes with a gorgeous 16:10 HiDPI VRR display. We will want to take advantage of two experimental Mutter features to set the scale factor to something that gets close to the effective geometry of a Full HD panel, like 150% of 175%, and VRR to make all full-screen content smoother by dynamically matching the screen's refresh rate to the frame rate of the content being displayed, thus eliminating various artifacts:
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['variable-refresh-rate','scale-monitor-framebuffer']"You may then access Settings > Display and toggle both of those features on after restarting the compositor.
Explicitly enabling Wayland rendering in apps to get rid of aliasing artifacts when fractional scaling is active
After enabling the scale-monitor-framebuffer experimental feature, even if the selected scale factor is integer, Legacy programs that still use XWayland to render will look blurry and display disturbing aliasing effects, due to the fact that they are being upscaled from their effective size up to the desired scale factor with a bilinear filter. On the other hand, all Wayland clients, at worst, get rendered at a much higher resolution as integer-scaling in a virtual framebuffer, and then a downsampling trick is used to scale them back to the effective display's resolution, which only produces some barely perceptible aliasing. At best, Wayland clients that implement the Wayland Fractional Scale Protocol will ask the compositor about the scale factor and take the matter into their own hands and rendering already scaled in a pixel-perfect fashion, without the resource consumption and slight artifacts of the downsampling trick.
A silver lining is that most clients have flags or options that allow experimental Wayland rendering, which usually comes with drawbacks far more bearable than the extreme artifacting of letting Mutter scale them. The strategy changes based on the toolkit or technology used.
Electron applications that are based on Electron 28 or later read the ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT environment variable, which can be used to force Wayland.
mkdir -p ~/.config/environment.d/ && \
echo "ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=auto" > ~/.config/environment.d/electron_wayland.confOlder Electron versions can be forced to use Wayland with the following flags:
--enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations
--ozone-platform-hint=auto
Typically, the way to go for these programs is:
- Create a local desktop file where the
Execline is modified to include those flags
- DNF-installed applications store their desktop files in
/usr/share/applications - Flatpak System-installed applications store their desktop files in
/var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/ - Flatpak user-installed applications store their desktop files in
~/.var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/ - The relevant desktop file needs to be copied over to
~/.local/share/applicationsand then modified in that location for the local override to work
- Use the shell profile file (e.g.
~/.profileor~/.zprofile) or any file sourced at shell startup to declare an alias that overrides the launch command of that application to include the flags.
Sometimes, applications installed through Flatpak have their sandbox set in a way that the Wayland socket is unreachable. Sometimes, enabling access to that socket is sufficient to get the client to use Wayland. Sometimes, that is necessary but it needs to be combined with another strategy. An example of this is Discord, which will require you to enable its Wayland socket, or else it will crash upon you setting the ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=auto environment variable.
To do that, either:
flatpak override --user --socket=wayland $APPLICATION_IDor do it graphically through Flatseal.
For example, Obsidian installed through Flathub can be configured to run on Wayland using the command:
flatpak override --user --socket=wayland md.obsidian.ObsidianFor the record, I prefer installing Jetbrains IDEs from their tar archives. In order to display these IDEs in Wayland mode, you need to switch them to the JetBrains Runtime, version 21.. The documentation for how to change runtime is here. From the dialog, make sure to choose a version of the runtime from 21.0 onwards. Finally, from the settings, choose "Edit Custom VM Options..." and paste in:
-Dawt.toolkit.name=WLToolkit
Restart the IDE, and text should look sharp.
Although I daily Firefox, I sometimes need to use Chromium-based browsers.
For that, navigate to chrome://flags/#ozone-platform-hint and set the flag to Wayland.
Programs based upon Mozilla's toolkit understand the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 environment variable.
As for Firefox, Fedora's preloaded build ran in Wayland with no setup for me, requiring no further action.
As for Thunderbird - I installed it through Flathub and I used Flatseal to set the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 environment variable.
Qt (5 and 6 at the time of writing) applications should already run in Wayland mode natively. But, in case they do not, they can be started with the QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland environment variable set.
For those of you who game in your spare time - XWayland also means games. For now, there are very few routes:
- Find a way to make the SDL or Vulkan context use Wayland. Trying to run games with
SDL_VIDEODRIVER=waylandis a good starting point but expect everything to break. - Go into Settings and temporarily revert the scale factor to 100% before starting Steam or the game's launcher to have the game detect the native resolution.
- There is supposedly a way to get aorund this limitation with Gamescope, but I have had no success so far.
Minecraft can take advantage of vulkanmod to work natively on Wayland. I recommend using Prism Launcher.
Factorio can be made use Wayland with the SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland environment variable.
Some Linux games will have graphical artifacts, because they bundled dependencies are too old for the very recent RDNA 3 graphics. This is easily worked around by forcing the Windows version through Proton. This will, oddly enough, load modern MESA and other dependencies, eliminating the artifacts and improving the performance.
Framework did a very fine job on this machine. The compnay should take it as a compliemnt that this gist contains zero Framework-specific fixes of workarounds, but more general Linux stuff for laptops with these specs, because no fixes are needed. This is easily the machine I have used that required the least amount of hardware-specific setup to work well: zero. I hope this gist has been useful!