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Comment by thereddaikon | Hacker News Reader

They work fine under Windows. Ergo the problem isn't the laptop, its the driver support under Linux.

In my experience current gen laptops except for certain ThinkPads and Clevos will have support issues in Linux. You get a much better experience using a model a year or two old because the community has had time to address any issues.

The design goal of the Framework wasn't out of the box 100% Linux support, it was reparability. While they encourage Linux development on the platform, what hardware works best to meet their design goal may or may not already have Linux support.

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An awful lot of the reviews and hype have been touting Linux support, and this review in particular says it "just works."

It doesn't, and I very much wish the company and reviewers had made that clearer.

>It doesn't, and I very much wish the company and reviewers had made that clearer.

The reviewers definitely need to do a better job of thorough testing before making claims. But in my experience it is common for things to inexplicably not work when before they did and vice versa in Linux with no good explanation as to why. It's part of the reason why "the year of the Linux desktop" is always next year IMO.

As for Framework themselves, I checked the product page and this is all they had to say about Linux support:

"Available in configurations with Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro, we’ve also tested for compatibility with common Linux distributions and will be publishing guides on using them."

I don't see those guides in the support section yet so it seems they don't support them yet. If a vendor doesn't explicitly list an OS as supported then I don't consider it supported. So like 99% of Linux situations I would assume YMMV.

I suspect that many of the reviewers were running 21.04 as opposed to 21.10 which has been acknowledged still has support issues.

I've also been running 21.04, though, and had all the issues I mentioned above in that environment.

In my case it just worked perfectly; though I have only tried with Gentoo and Guix

I love linux distros but let me just say that anytime I hear "linux" and "just works" in the same sentence, I knowingly snicker to myself at the road that lies in front of that poor sucker. I "just works" with plenty of learning opportunities included for free.

There was a time before current sleep issues where this was true.

You could buy some laptops, install a decent distro and be on your way. Nowadays sleep issues are affecting most recent CPUs, I had a pretty poor experience on any laptop. I picked a Surface 2 because there was a community effort (linux-surface) and I still have the same sleep / freezing issues I had on day one, despite my model being covered in green checkmarks on the support page of the project.

Unfortunately OSS is people working for free in their spare time and you can't expect much. Honestly I wish a company would come up and make a paid linux distro with proper support for one model.

I'd be happy to pay for an operative system that works and it's not Mac OS or Windows, as they both suck pretty bad in their latest iterations.

My ideal UX is the configuration of KDE I've used for years or my Sway setup, not window managers without tiling support and limited proprietary file managers which are designed for noobs.

>Unfortunately OSS is people working for free in their spare time and you can't expect much.

The majority of Linux dev work is actually done by paid devs at tech companies who contribute to Linux. Its been this way for years now. The reason it doesn't seem that way is because almost all of that contribution is going to enterprise code with the rest going to supporting whatever technologies those companies directly use. Google isn't spending time on making x86 laptop sleep states work, they are improving Android. Same with Amazon, they are contributing code that makes Linux more useful in AWS.

The consumer side is much much worse supported than the enterprise side. And there are actually paid versions of Linux that have paid development and support behind them. But again, it isn't aimed at PCs so PC specific features aren't getting fixed.

The only software company I can think of that is putting serious resources behind improving Linux on the PC is Valve.

> You get a much better experience using a model a year or two old because the community has had time to address any issues.

It's what I do. I bought a used LG Gram 17" with 24 GB of RAM about 18 months ago I think. Ultra lightweight (I think it's the lightest 17" laptop that exists) and I've got zero issue under Linux. It may not be as good as the Mac M1 I also own but it is lighter, has more RAM, works fine with Linux and cost me only 400 EUR (granted, that was a good deal back then).

For a laptop running Linux I never buy the latest of the latest.

I've pre-ordered my framework with the expectation that Linux support will rapidly improve because lots of hackers will buy them, same as what happened with classic thinkpads.

FWIW, if you want a laptop that is specifically designed to work with Linux, Star Labs does that.

https://us.starlabs.systems/

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