Last Wednesday, the parcel arrived, one day prior to the expected delivery date. I wanted to show my girlfriend how to expand memory and storage on a computer, so we did the whole process together. Despite being one of the less tech-savvy people I know, she assembled it with minor assistance from me in about 10 minutes. And it was ready to be powered on. The laptop took about one horribly long minute to initialize the 32GB of RAM during the first boot but now it boots in around 15 seconds.
I went against Framework’s recommendation and installed EndeavourOS, a distro I’m familiar with and love. After disabling secure boot, I installed it without any issues, and the experience has been seamless to this day. One important tip I want to share is that you need to specify your region to access the 5GHz WiFi bands, as described here. So no worries if you like arch, there shouldn’t be any problems!
Before receiving my unit, I had concerns about the battery’s ability to last through my long university days, and I considered purchasing the larger 60Wh battery. I’ve read somewhere that some Linux installations drain the battery more than Windows, especially during sleep mode. Although, I can’t speak for Windows, I have not had any problems with idle drain whatsoever. -Even without the official support of my distro.
Imho the battery life is insane! Last Thursday, I started with 85% and the laptop lasted around 10h before I plugged it in at 6%. Admittedly, I took some breaks, but I estimate the SOT on that day to be around 8-9 hours. Truly impressive!
My specs: AMD 7640 | 32GB Kingston Fury 5600MT/s CL40 | 1TB Lexar NM790 SSD
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My battery life has been excellent too, and I have the 60Wh one. Haven’t noticed idle drain when suspended (Ubuntu) either. Very happy so far.
I went with 16gb of ram, have you seen any benefit to 32gb?
Absolutely not. Came not even close to 16GB usage (yet) But I thought that it would be nice to have, and that the prices wouldn’t go lower anytime soon, so I thought I might as well take the 32Gigs
Haha ok thanks for the honest response, I was starting to get FOMO about it!
Thanks for sharing, nice to hear about the experience of someone that’s not that tech-savvy putting these together, really shows how well it’s designed.
Really glad to hear about the battery life. I own their 1st iteration (11th gen i5), and the battery life…heavy sigh…leaves much to be desired. I prefer a 15~16" laptop, 13" feels claustrophobic to me, but I wanted to support Framework.
I was able to get into Batch 2 for the 16, and it takes every fiber of my being not to constantly check their blog/forums for delivery updates. lol
