I’m returning my Framework 16

My current laptop is an aging X1 Carbon generation 7, purchased some time in mid
2019. A few months ago a few keys of the keyboard stopped working, specifically
the 5, 6, -, = and Delete keys. Sometimes I can get it working again by
mashing one of them for a while, but it’s not consistent. Given my past
experiences with X1 Carbon laptops breaking outside of warranty and the
frustration that comes with replacing their components, I decided it was time to
look for a replacement.

Unfortunately, buying a new X1 Carbon wasn’t going to be an option: when it
comes to displays you now basically have two choices: a subpar not-quite-2K IPS
display, or a 2.5K (ish) OLED display. Since I use my laptop for programming
and often use it in low light conditions such as a living room with dimmed
lights in the evening, OLED just doesn’t make sense. Knowing my luck I’d also
run into OLED burn-in the moment the warranty expires. There are also some
other issues with the X1 line in general, such as poor CPU cooling and the
absolute nightmare that is opening them up to replace parts or clean them
properly.

I looked at some other brands but it appears that in 2025 there’s just aren’t
many good options for Linux users. I narrowed it down to two options:

1. Buy a refurbished M1 or M2 Macbook and run Asahi Linux
2. Buy a Framework

I eliminated the use of Asahi Linux because of the following reasons:

1. The battery life doesn’t appear to be all that better than conventional
   laptops when running Linux. This isn’t entirely surprising because of a lot
   of the battery improvements on macOS are the result of the software and
   hardware integration, not just the hardware
2. There seem to be issues with suspend not working as well (at least based on
   various comments I came across), and hardware support in general is a bit
   dodgy
3. If something needs replacing I basically have an expensive paperweight,
   because everything is soldered together, assuming you could even find spare
   parts in the first place
4. I’m not sure Asahi as a project will still be around in 5 years, but my
   laptop will be

In contrast, Framework laptops has many supposed benefits: they’re upgradable,
repairable, actively work on Linux and even FreeBSD support (or at least sponsor
developers working on this), allow you to customize the keyboard using
QMK/VIAL. In fact, on paper it
sounds like the perfect developer laptop. In reality, I’m not so sure.

Table of contents

Configuration

Framework has three models of laptops: a 12 inch, 13.5 inch and 16 inch laptop.
My X1 Carbon is a 14 inch laptop but I’ve always felt like I wanted something
just slightly larger. I ended up buying the Framework 16 for two reason:

1. I read various reports of the Framework 13 having issues with poor battery
   life, fan noise, heating, etc
2. While 16 inch is a fair bit larger than 14 inch, I was hoping it would be
   manageable size wise

The base configuration is as follows:

• Framework 16 DIY edition
• CPU: Ryzen AI 7 350
• RAM: 2×8 GiB DDR5-5600
• SSD: WD Black SN7100, 500 GiB

I also bought an additional Intel AX210 WiFi card in case the default Mediatek
card would cause any trouble, as I don’t trust brands other than Intel when it
comes to WiFi.

Shipping took about a week or so, with the laptop making quite the journey from
Taiwan to the Philippines to China, then to Japan and then back to China, then
to Istanbul, then to France and at last to The Netherlands. I’m not sure what
happened here, maybe the pilot got drunk or perhaps Fedex’ tracking is just
broken.

Building the laptop

I bought the DIY edition which requires some manual assembly, though not nearly
as much as I feared. All I had to do was install the SSD, RAM, and the keyboard
spacers. The spacers, touchpad and keyboard use magnetic connectors so
installing and removing them is trivial. To access the SSD and RAM slots you
need to unscrew a plate that sits between these slots and the keyboard, but this
only takes a few minutes using the provided screwdriver.

I didn’t measure how long it took me to install it the first time, but opening
it up and putting it back together a second time only took perhaps 5-10 minutes
at most. For comparison, to replace most parts of the X1 Carbon you essentially
have to take the whole thing apart and unscrew countless screws many of which
are hard to find. Unsurprisingly, I’ve lost some of these screws over the years
and dreaded opening it up the few times I had to.

This is an area where Framework excels compared to all other brands: it’s just
so easy to swap the parts out that it puts other brands to shame when it comes
to hardware maintainability.

Operating system

For the operating system I initially gave FreeBSD 15 a quick try. I knew it
wasn’t going to be the final OS due to it still having issues with the Framework
hardware (e.g. suspend doesn’t work properly), but I figured it was worth a try
just to see what would happen. The installation went fine and WiFi worked fine,
though that was because I swapped the Mediatek card with the Intel AX210 as the
Mediatek card doesn’t work at all on FreeBSD. Upon loading the AMD drivers I
encountered a kernel crash, likely due to the same issue as discussed in this
drm-kmod issue. A laptop
without working GPU drivers isn’t going to work, so at this point I decided to
give up on FreeBSD (again) and
install Fedora 43 instead.

Fedora 43 worked just fine as expected, and everything worked, so let’s take a
look at the hardware.

Weight

The Framework 16 weights about 2.2 kg according to my kitchen scale. For
comparison, my X1 Carbon weights 1.3 kg. That may not seem like a big
difference, but the extra kilogram makes carrying around the Framework 16 more
difficult. In particular, I don’t feel comfortable carrying it with just one
hand while this isn’t a problem with the X1.

The Framework is best described as a bit of a chonker and I certainly don’t see
myself carrying it around a lot. This also gives it a bit of an identity crisis:
laptops should be portable, otherwise why not just get a desktop. And yet the
Framework 16 is neither portable nor remotely as powerful as a desktop, so who
exactly is the target audience?

Design

The design of the laptop is a bit polarizing. I like the combination of black
and silver, but I hate how janky it all looks and feels due to the removable
spacers. Note the lines separating the touchpad from the spacers on the left and
right of it:

Not only does it look weird, you can also feel the gap and edges when resting
your palm on them. The silver spacers and touchpad are also raised slightly
relative to the black keyboard area, and the edges are quite sharp. If you have
arm hairs you may consider shaving them off or risk getting them stuck. I also
suspect gunk will build up in these edges over time.

The spacers aren’t held solid in place either, meaning you can move them around
and they have a bit of flex to them:

There’s also a practical problem: due to the flex of the spacers if you try to
hold the laptop on its sides it will actually “wobble” a bit. Combined with the
weight I suspect that unless you hold on to this laptop for dear life, you
will at some point drop it.

These issues could be considered a minor issue in isolation but remember, this
model costs two thousand Euros (I’ll bring this up a few more times). For
a premium price I expect a premium design and build quality, and this isn’t it.

Display

The display isn’t terrible, but it’s not great either. Like most laptop displays
that aren’t Macbooks there’s a bit of flex to the display, though this shouldn’t
be much of an issue. The colors of the display are overly saturated, with reds
in particular looking more intense than they should. Here’s a silly example of
what a particular shade of red looks like on my X1 Carbon:

And here’s the same color on the Framework 16:

Note that both displays were using the same brightness and the same color
temperature/night light setting. For comparison, here’s what those colors should
look like when using a properly calibrated (at the hardware level at least) Eizo
CS2740 that I use for my desktop:

I’m aware the quality of the photos isn’t great, but if you compare the
Framework version to the others you’ll notice the colors are more saturated
compared to what they should look like.

The white/grey uniformity also leaves a lot to be desired, though this is true
for all modern IPS displays that aren’t manufactured by Eizo:

I find non-uniform displays distracting as it can create a sort of tunnel vision
effect/feeling. While the X1 Carbon also suffers from this problem, it feels
less pronounced than in case of the Framework. Of course the Eizo display
doesn’t suffer from this problem at all (hence I bought it), but then it again
it costs a ridiculous €1700.

Which brings us to the brightness. This display is bright, even at the lowest
setting. I found various forum posts that mention the Framework 13 suffers from
a similar issue but that you can at least now lower the brightness further on
recent versions of Linux, but this isn’t supported for the Framework 16. Here’s
what that looks like in practice:

The Framework 16 is on the left and the X1 Carbon on the right, both set to the
lowest brightness setting that is still usable.

The Framework 16 being so much brighter means that using it in a darker room
(e.g. a living room at night with the lights dimmed) makes you feel like a deer
looking into the headlights of a car that’s about to run you over. In other
words, not fun.

Power LED

On the topic of brightness, the power button in the top right corner of the
keyboard has an LED that can’t be turned off in the BIOS. Instead, you can set
it to a few different settings including “Ultra low”, but it doesn’t make much
of a difference as even at the lowest setting it’s still too bright. This
wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t sitting in the bottom right corner of your eye
when you look at the display.

I ended up using this systemd
service
to turn the LED off upon booting, but something as simple as this should just be
a BIOS option. Not being able to turn the LED off is apparently a
feature.

GPU

I didn’t do any GPU intensive testing such as video decoding. One
annoying issue is that the display has a tendency to flicker. On top of that,
there’s a “nice” feature where the GPU reduces the display brightness based on
the contents on the screen to conserve battery. The problem is that it
takes a good two seconds or so to adjust, making it obvious and jarring to look
at. It’s especially noticeable when switching to the workspace overview in Gnome
and back, due to a large section of this overview being a dark color.

This feature is disabled by adding amdgpu.abmlevel=0 to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX
in /etc/default/grubg, followed by running sudo grub2-mkconfig -o
/boot/grub2/grub.cfg and a reboot. This also seems to reduce the amount of
flickering, though it still happened a few times after applying this setting.

Some additional details on the ambient dimming anti-feature are in this
forum post.

I can see the value of this feature but only if the GPU waits longer before
adjusting the brightness and increases the transition time so it’s less obvious.
In it’s current form it’s just a nuisance.

CPU

The CPU is fine, though I didn’t extensively test its performance. It’s
certainly better than the mediocre Intel CPU of my X1 Carbon. One thing I
noticed is that the CPU makes a sort of coil whine/crackling BZZZZZZ noise when
under load. This isn’t unique to Framework (e.g. my X1 also does this), the more
open design (e.g. there’s a big fan grill/mesh at the top of the keyboard) makes
this more noticeable.

I can’t speak about the fan noise because I never heard them. This could either
mean they are quiet enough or that I didn’t stress the CPU enough.

Battery

I didn’t do any proper testing of battery usage, but it seems to be on par with
other Linux capable laptops based on my usage thus far. This means you’ll likely
be looking at 6-8 hours of battery per charge for average programming usage. It
seems this is the case for basically any reasonable Linux-capable laptop these
days, unfortunately.

I did notice that it drains quite a bit when suspended: when I put it to sleep
the first night the battery was at 47%. When I opened the laptop again some 8
hours later the battery was at 42%. This means you’re looking at about 5% of
battery per average night, which isn’t great. Hibernate could be an alternative
but support for it on Fedora is a bit dodgy and requires some manual work I’m
not interested in, so I didn’t test this.

WiFi and Bluetooth

Both the Intel and Mediatek cards work without issue. Both achieve the same
speeds on my 1 Gbps connection over a 5Ghz network (with a channel width of
80mhz): about 800-900 Mbps for uploads and somewhere between 600 and 700 Mbps
for downloads. While not being able to achieve the full 1 Gbps speed over WiFi
is expected, I was a bit surprised to see that uploads are in fact faster than
downloads.

I tested various other devices with similar WiFi hardware and they all upload
and download at about the same speeds, and all operate at slightly lower speeds
(500-600 Mbps, depending on your luck).

I don’t think it’s the network itself either: the access points are TP-Link
EAP660 HDs that can handle speeds well beyond 1 Gbps. As far as I know the
configuration is also sound (including the use of specific channels to reduce
interference to a minimum).

Still, 600-700 Mbps over WiFi is more than I’ll probably ever need so I didn’t
dive into this further.

I didn’t specifically test Bluetooth but it did detect a few devices, so I’ll
assume this will work just fine.

Keyboard

Some reviews I read mentioned that the keyboard has a bit of flex to it, but I
didn’t notice this. The keycaps are a little mushy, which isn’t too bad but not
great either. The difference in key size and spacing compared to the X1 did mean
I pressed the wrong key at times, but I suspect this is just a matter of
adjusting.

The keyboard runs QMK, albeit a rather outdated version of QMK released in 2022.
I experimented with porting the code to a newer version so I could take
advantage of some features that I use in my split keyboard, but couldn’t get it
to work. The official way to configure the keyboard is by using this VIAL web
application. This application requires WebHID
support which isn’t implemented by Firefox, requiring me to install and use
Chromium just to configure the keyboard. This isn’t enough though, as on Linux
you’ll need to install some additional udev rules to get things working. The
official rules provided by QMK didn’t work, instead I used the rules from this
forum reply.

Once set up I was able to configure the keyboard such as by changing the layout
from QWERTY to Colemak-DH. VIAL is pretty basic though and the interface is
rather clunky, so I’m not a fan of this approach. I hope that at some point
Framework will upstream their keyboard logic into the official QMK repository to
make this process easier.

Trackpad

The trackpad is decent, though I noticed it’s overly sensitive when it comes to
scrolling. For example, on various occasions I lifted my fingers off the
trackpad without any swiping motion and somehow still managed to trigger a
scrolling motion. The trackpad of the X1 Carbon doesn’t have this problem and
subsequently is easier and more pleasant to use.

Speakers

They’re terribly. Or more precisely, they’re terrible when the volume is less
than 50% or so. What appears to be happening is that adjusting the volume below
50% doesn’t result in it being louder but instead changes how it sounds (for a
lack of a better description). At lower volumes it sounds like sound playing
over a phone in speaker mode, with a sort of tin can/metallic sound to it. Once
you hit 50% or so it starts to sound more like an OK set of speakers but it also
becomes noticeable louder. There’s a setting in the BIOS that you can set to
“Linux” mode to supposedly improve the quality but it was already set to this
value.

While most laptop speakers aren’t great (even the Dolby Atmos speakers of the X1
Carbon are mediocre), for a laptop that costs two thousand Euros the sound
is disappointing.

Modular ports

An interesting feature of the Framework is that you can swap out the various
ports. You want 6 USB-C ports? You can do that! What about 3 headphone jacks?
Also possible! Replacing them is quite easy, though for some reason my headphone
jack adapter required some additional force to be removed.

Like the keyboard area the design is a bit janky though, with visible
lines/space between the adapters and the case, though this at least is something
you won’t notice unless you’re explicitly looking for it.

Conclusion

Which brings me to the conclusion: is it worth buying this laptop, considering
most configurations will cost you around two thousand Euros? To be honest,
no, not at all. For a premium price I expect a premium laptop, but the Framework
16 feels more like a €1200-€1500 laptop at best and certainly doesn’t deliver
a premium experience. I understand Framework is a young company still trying to
figure out a lot of things, but two thousand Euros for this kind of laptop
is just absurd.

For this reason I’ve submitted a request to return the laptop. What I’ll be
replacing my X1 Carbon with instead I’m not entirely sure of. One option is the
Framework 13 given that it solves at least some issues I have with the Framework
16 (e.g. it’s bulkiness and inability to lower the brightness further), but it
also seems to share many of the other issues such as poor speaker quality and
(at least from hat I could find) worse heat regulation, and a (possibly) worse
battery.

I’ve looked at various other brands such as System76 and the many other Clevo
resellers, but they all seem to suffer similar issues such as poor battery life,
poor performance, difficult to maintain hardware wise, or some combination
thereof.

I guess for now the X1 Carbon will have to hold out a little longer, provided I
don’t throw it out of the window the next time I can’t get the various dodgy
keyboard keys to work.