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I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

simonhartcher.com

311–320 of 541 posts

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#311
post #6

The ISA has nothing to do with the battery life. Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack. Framework doesn't control every level of the stack. Arguably they don't control any of it.

And worth noting that it isn't even vertical integration that is the advantage here.

Sleep/Hibernation works fine on the Framework under Windows. It's just Linux that has this problem.

I use MacOS because of this - I'm never going to use a Windows laptop, and I'd prefer Linux but power management just isn't there.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#312
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Framework is a personal device, not for work. I might use it once a day or less for a couple hours or less. It was 100% charged this past Saturday night when I picked it up off the charger. I used it for an hour or two looking for doing some planning for Halloween. Nothing serious, just browsing with Firefox. I shut the lid and placed it on the coffee table. I picked it up Sunday night to find the battery had depl…

Windows has automatic Modern Standby to Hibernate support (by default after 5% battery drain in standby). If it is not entering Hibernate, there may be an application keeping the system awake.

What about the other 95% of the time?

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#313
post #7

I wish Framework offered a laptop with an ARM64 processor. I have a Surface Laptop 7 with a Snapdragon CPU on Windows 11 and it's been awesome so far. Insane battery life, especially in standby. I can reopen it after 48 hours and it only lost 3% of battery, while it stayed connected to WiFi and received notifications all along.

The difference here is Windows vs Linux, not ARM vs x64 (unfortunately) . Windows on Intel/AMD works just as well.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what are those details? Sounds like you know specifics that I'd like to also know. If you're claiming it is just an oversight, then please back it up.

Timer coalescing, idle wakeup minimization, race-to-idle optimization, etc. It's not a single oversight, it's a massive project that needs to be carried out throughout an operating system. Linux's usual advantage of decentralization and wide distro variety with massive customization potential is a disadvantage here. To have a power-efficient system you need all of the software to be working toward the same goal. One…

> Linux's usual advantage of decentralization and wide distro variety with massive customization potential is a disadvantage here.

How so? You need each thing to do its part, but that decentralizes perfectly well because it isn't actually integration at all, it's just a hundred different pieces each doing it right.

And open source has the further advantage that you're not beholden to the maintainer. If Framework notices that piece #37 is wasting power, they have the code and can fix it themselves. If the upstream isn't completely asleep at the switch they'll accept the patch, and even if they are you can still ship it on your own device.

Where this can get messed up is in one of two ways. The first is if something is not open source and then the vendor fails to fix it but also fails to supply anyone else with the capacity to fix it. But this isn't a problem with integration, it's a problem with filthy knuckleheads not keeping their heads on straight and calls for some new competitors to show them how to do it.

The second is something like an actual trade off, e.g. if you want the machine to be able to wake via network packet or pressing a key on the keyboard then you'd need the network controller or USB controller to stay in a low power state instead of being dead off. And then that might cost you half a watt, but you're paying it in order to get something, and then somebody has to decide if Linux users would typically want a default where that feature works or one where the battery can last a month in standby, since it's one or the other.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timer coalescing, idle wakeup minimization, race-to-idle optimization, etc. It's not a single oversight, it's a massive project that needs to be carried out throughout an operating system. Linux's usual advantage of decentralization and wide distro variety with massive customization potential is a disadvantage here. To have a power-efficient system you need all of the software to be working toward the same goal. One…

> Linux's usual advantage of decentralization and wide distro variety with massive customization potential is a disadvantage here. How so? You need each thing to do its part, but that decentralizes perfectly well because it isn't actually integration at all, it's just a hundred different pieces each doing it right. And open source has the further advantage that you're not beholden to the maintainer. If Framework noti…

You’re right that it’s “a hundred different pieces each doing it right” but you gloss over the disadvantage of decentralization: getting everybody on board with the project. With a centralized product (such as at Apple) the CEO can say “I want to increase battery life on existing hardware by 20% before next release or you’re fired” and people will work 80 hours a week to get that done. With open source? You’ve got ten thousand different projects, each with their own leadership and their own priorities. You have no leverage at all to get them all to work on power efficiency, so naturally it takes a back seat to them working on their favourite features.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#316
post #29
post #17

The complaint about power usage in suspend is especially sad because it’s pretty much a common problem for Linux on laptops. Not sure if that’s what applies here, but the numbers about match what I see with my Framework. Basically: if you want to use secure boot you usually also want kernel lockdown mode, and you cannot hibernate a lockdowned kernel. At least not without out-of-tree patches. IMHO that’s a giant issue…

> If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low. This is cope. An Apple Silicon Macbook does not need to suspend to block devices to save energy (they only do this when the battery is empty). ChromeOS doesn't offer hibernate at all. The only reason that a Framework can't have good battery life in an operating state is that nobody is paying attention to the detai…

and yet my M1 manages to drain the battery in suspend mode in just a few hours

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#317
you folks should really try the lenovo yoga series. especially this year's yoga slim aura edition (which has the intel lunar lake chips). The ipex-llm extensions are fairly stable and work very well ( https://github.com/intel/intel-extension-for-pytorch )

and the build quality of the laptop is exactly like the macbook air - i have both.

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#318

Is this person using deep sleep? I always make sure I'm on deep sleep. I know it's gross: Put this in a file: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="mem_sleep_default=deep In /etc/default/grub.d/90_memsleepdefault.cfg Then run update-grub And reboot. Run this to check if deep sleep is enabled: cat /sys/power/mem_sleep If it says [deep] your good

I will try this. Thank you

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#319
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of box hibernation support in popular Linux distros is also something we want badly. We’re watching this one eagerly: https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/pull/1417

Let’s see how long DHH & co can keep harvesting low hanging fruit of Linux laptop problems. I’d expect they’ll plateau soon but I would love to be surprised. I’m torn between my instinct to classify anything from DHH as mostly hype, my faith in Linux kernel developers, and my cynicism toward Linux kernel developers.

I will be very surprised if DHH fixes something that hasn't been properly solved in mainline Linux distros for years. (decades?)

Re: I'm spoiled by Apple Silicon but still love Framework

#320
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't deny that suspend is an issue on Linux I've just never seen this as a major problem? I simply turn off my laptop and turn it on when I need it - boot times are less than a minute so it really isn't a issue for me, just flick the power switch, wait for a bit then I'm good to go.

“Less than a minute” is going to feel horribly slow to people that are used to instant-resume and not having to think about shutdown vs. sleep. You might be okay with it, but I suspect most consumers today won’t be.

I've never used sleep on my laptop. I always have the lid set to 'do nothing' when closed (i.e., stay on and keep running). In the past I gave up on using a macbook for many reasons, but a key one was that I couldn't keep the machine on when closing the lid. I can't fathom having to reconnect terminal sessions or other similar connections every time I want to move from one meeting room to another. Carrying my laptop awkwardly with the lid open between rooms just seems silly. I just close my lid and let the laptop keep running and then hibernate at the end of the day, resuming the next morning. True instant-on, and no downsides to me.
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