[pojntfx]

I'm really looking forward to having this as the go-to laptop to recommend to devs again. The original Framework chassis was really showing it's age next to e.g. a MacBook Pro or the new XPS 14.

Having mainline Linux on a system with 24h+ battery life in a 13" case is pretty damn impressive.

[jampekka]

> Having mainline Linux on a system with 24h+ battery life in a 13" case is pretty damn impressive.

Does it have such battery life on Linux? The benchmarks, apart from suspend battery life, are for Windows.

[sdoering]

Can't attest to framework, but after switching to an arch based syttem on my Quite low level HP Envy 13'' I get about 130% - 170% of time out of the system.

Yes, I am running mostly in dark mode now. Yes, I am using the terminal significantly more often now (80% of the time). But also I have always a browser, always Slack, WhatsApp, Obsidian and more often than not a few other things running on virtual screens.

Just the added battery life made this my daily driver. Yes - I so, so want to buy a framework. Still waiting for the multicolored international keyboards - and also the prices for memory just kill it for me right now. The system I would love to have is about 2k more than a few months ago. I just can't splurge that much right now.

[luqtas]

unless you screen is OLED, dark-mode has no or zero impact on battery usage, maybe even non-significant impact on OLEDs

[pxc]

HP Envy does have OLED screen options. I'd assume it's what they have, if they thought dark mode was relevant.

[aembleton]

Don't most LCD screens have localised dimming of the backlight these days?

[3836293648]

Not laptops. Local dimming zones look awful when you have a white cursor moving around, so it's mostly still just a TV-feature

[wtallis]

Looking awful has not prevented local dimming from becoming quite common on laptops. Apple has been doing an okay job of it in the MacBook Pro for several years. Lots of Windows laptops have been very hit-or-miss about it, but at least with those you often have an OLED option. I've seen multiple Windows laptops from more than one OEM where opening a terminal window with light text on a dark background means you can easily spot a single line of text getting much dimmer toward the center of the dark window, and lighter near the perimeter where it's close to other light content. And that's for static content; as you mentioned motion can bring more problems as the backlight lags behind the LCD.

[Chemiseblanc]

I'm using CachyOS on my framework and after switching from windows gained about 30%-50% battery life depending on exactly what I'm doing.

[pxc]

Wow. For as long as I can remember it was usually the opposite for me. Even after configuring TLP and looking for things to tune manually with powertop, I usually didn't get battery usage quite as low as I wanted. I thought it was still typical for Windows to be better.

Are you running a DE or just a lightweight WM?

[sdoering]

I’m running a Hyprland-based setup, so more WM/compositor than full DE, with a small bit of tuning in Arch’s power settings.

[kelnos]

I'd be surprised. Granted, not quite apples-to-apples, but I have the original Framework 13 chassis, 13th-gen Intel mainboard, original battery, and I've never gotten more than 5 hours or so, 6, maybe, at most, on Linux. Yes, the new 13 Pro comes with a larger batter, and maybe the new mainboard is more power-efficient, but 24h+ sounds way too optimistic.

[cromka]

Panther lake is substantially more efficient than your 13th gen and they increased the battery capacity by 35%. They claim 20h, not 24h, and that 20h is for video watching, not general use.

[pojntfx]

Don't see why it wouldn't - as long as pstate etc. works it should be the same. I'd argue it's probably better given that modern desktops use far less resources in the background compared to Windows

I bet they don't publish Linux numbers because it depends on which desktop you use etc.

[michaelt]

A lot of office workers these days spend a lot of time in video calls.

So to get the best battery life you need, for example, your browser to use GPU-accelerated video encoding and decoding.

Linux is something of a second-class citizen for both GPU vendors and browser vendors. So for example if you're using Firefox and an nvidia GPU on Linux? No video encode/decode acceleration for you. The browser will silently switch to CPU decoding.

This translates into worse battery life.

[pwnna]

HW video decoding is now available and by default on in Chrome on at least Ubuntu with my Intel iGPU. I was also surprised when they turned it on under the radar. I saw this the other day debugging a problem and saw others see it too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/1ojydv9/comment/nm8...

[JohnTHaller]

Firefox has had GPU video decoding in Linux on by default since 2023 for Intel and 2025 for AMD from what I've read

[temp0826]

HW decoding works fine. But some distros (looking at you Fedora) have legal issues around providing it out of the box.

[giancarlostoro]

Call me crazy, but most people working typically leave their laptops wired in to either a charger or a hub so they can have more monitors. I know some people will go through the effort of charging and pulling the cord, and charging later, but most people don't want to micromanage something they can forget about while working. If you're living on battery life for a work call, it would not matter if you're on Windows, changes are high your batterly life will self-terminate quicker than you realize.

[michaelt]

Among Linux users, long battery life is for in-office workers (who leave their desk to attend meetings) in hybrid companies (where no meetings are laptop-free) in roles that sometimes involve back-to-back meetings.

[d3Xt3r]

But these people would already have a company-provisioned laptop.

[mmcnl]

CPU decoding/encoding for video means warm chassis + spinning fans. Fan noise is very annoying with video calls.

[unethical_ban]

I don't understand why. From what I can tell, some of this is remedied just by changing feature flags in Firefox, which (if correct) would mean it ships with the capability, but decides not to.

There's other software that can do GPU acceleration in the repos, and there are plenty of distros that enable closed-source software. It's shocking to me how difficult it seems to be to get GPU acceleration working in Linux.

[jampekka]

> I bet they don't publish Linux numbers because it depends on which desktop you use etc.

They ship with Ubuntu on it, which would be quite natural choice for such benchmark. Also they do do the standby test on Ubuntu for some reason.

Can't help but suspect there's a reason why Linux numbers are not given. :(

[cogman10]

There have been fairly recent changes to the linux kernel to better support panther lake in terms of power performance. I'd suspect a major reason for holding back is because ubuntu 26.04 has not been released yet and it is using kernel 7.0 which includes these power improvements. 24.04 does not.

By the time these laptops start shipping, 26.04 should be released and testing should be easy. I suspect no major differences from it vs windows.

7.1 includes even more performance improvements for panther lake. [1]

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Enabled-Intel-FRED

[pinum]

If I was releasing a laptop with Linux support as a key selling point, and the battery life was bad on Ubuntu 24.04 but good on the pre-release 26.04, then I'd advertise the good figures and write "tested on Ubuntu 26.04 beta, requires Linux 7.0 or later" in the footnotes.

I definitely /wouldn't/ rely on just Windows figures for a machine that's otherwise advertised as "Linux first". If the battery life was the same on both, I'd prominently mention that.

[ssl-3]

I'm a long-time Linux user who might actually be in the market for a just-works upgradeable laptop[1] that comes with Ubuntu.

I already know that combinations of hardware and software can be stretched and tweaked to do really interesting things in really excellent ways. I don't need them to tell me that computer systems are flexible. That's just noise.

And I don't want them to tell me how their (unreleased) hardware might work in the future with some unreleased/beta software. That tends to be interpreted as speculation, or as lies and deceit.

I'd prefer to see benchmarks of how it works if it shipped today.

If those benchmarks are unsavory (as they may presently be) and thus omitted, then that's not ideal but it's okay.

I definitely don't want to feel as if I'm being lied to, in place of an omission.

[1]: I just want a 15" version. I'm not a fan of little screens. My eyes aren't getting any better.

[luyu_wu]

Keep in mind the Ultra 300 chips also only have recent support in the kernel. The battery life likely isn't great for now (as with previous gen Intels right after release). It makes sense to me that for now the benchmarks would be Windows specific.

[cogman10]

Ubuntu 26.04 hasn't been released yet and that's likely what they'll test on. It includes kernel 7.0 which has a bunch of the panther lake support.

[muyuu]

DHH has been posting specific support for Framework, so maybe Omarchy/Arch is one of the main options.

[kombine]

As a community we shouldn't give Omarchy or DHH any publicity. For both technical [1] and ethical reasons.

[1] https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/a-word-on-omarchy/

[dtj1123]

Genuine question, what is it about DHH that makes you think he can move the needle on battery life for Linux?

My understanding is that he's a giant in the enterprise software space, I don't see how that would give him any clout in the hardware space.

[muyuu]

battery life for Linux is not some grand project, it's just support and setup of existing kernel drivers, typically at the distro level - which is why it's already there for some setups

https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2046677012878708834

he mentioned good numbers before, but of course you may want to wait for reviews

[dismalaf]

I don't see why it wouldn't? I have a 16" MSI laptop with an 11th gen Intel processor (known for horrible battery life), I use Arch/Hyprland and it gets 5-6 hours with a battery degraded to 68%. Which is still in the ballpark of what most users said they got on Windows when this model was new.

Linux battery life is fine and on par with (or possibly better than) Windows these days if you don't do anything silly (I'm sure some distro and DE consume silly amounts of power just because, but it doesn't have to be that way).

Based on reports about Panther Lake, the new process, plus a 13" screen and large-ish battery, I believe the battery life claims.

[mayama]

They have a battery live stream from 100% to 0 linked on their product page which is broken. Hopefully they'll fix it and add both linux and windows version of the test.

[zackify]

DHH has been using omarchy with pantherlake getting 16+ hours

[cassepipe]

Yes, it was not mentionned often in the list of complaints about the fw 13 because the chassis was good enough but my main gripe was that it felt flimsy.

Strangely it was not flimsy and held its own but it felt flimsy and to be honest I never was quite able to tell why. What one want for a premium laptop is the satisfying rigidity of a Macbook and it didn't have it.

So for me this new chassis is a banger release. It's amazing that I can just drop my "old" hardware in it and it would just work.

[CarVac]

Rigid = premium-feeling

Strong = won't break

My Framework 13 is robust but isn't the most rigid-feeling. If I one-hand hold the laptop by the front edge it presses the touchpad clicker.

[jordand]

The LPCAMM2 memory is both the biggest plus for me, and the biggest challenge for it given how rare it is to find in stock, and the premium price over LPDDR5 and crazy prices of it.

[subscribed]

Featute/performance wise the latest 13s are great for anything work related (I have this small AMD one), but the battery life is pretty awful.