I was recently in the market for a new personal-use laptop and wanted to try out a Framework Laptop. I was intrigued by the idea of being able to replace any part that failed or even upgrade parts as I went. I also was frustrated with the direction that Windows 10 and Windows 11 was going.

They seemed more interested in advertising, tracking, sending notifications to increase my engagement of their apps, then just building an operating system that got out of my way and let me do my thing.

Here’s my brief thoughts.

I ordered the Framework 13" Laptop w/ AMD and installed Ubuntu Linux on it because it was considered well supported by Framework. The build quality felt very solid and I appreciated the ability to pick and choose what ports I had. Most laptops are switching to USB C, but I still had a number of USB A devices like my Yubikey or even slapping an HDMI port or Ethernet port in the cases that I need to do some network troubleshooting.

I encountered a few issues, but here’s how to fix them.

Issue 1 - Flickering screen

The first issue I saw was that my screen would randomly flicker white. Some others that it was a bug in the AMD drivers.

The fix was quick. All I had to do was add the the Kernel arg amdgpu.sg_display=0 to the boot config:

/etc/default/grub

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 GRUB_DEFAULT=0
 GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden
 GRUB_TIMEOUT=0
 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
-GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
+GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash amdgpu.sg_display=0"
 GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

Then reboot.

Issue 2 - AMD Wi-Fi Card

My next issue frequently when I’d come out of standby, the Wi-Fi card would be stuck. I wouldn’t be able to get it unstuck without a reboot which got really annoying to reboot five times a day. Running sudo iwlist scan would give me No scan results. A number of articles talked about strategies, install this driver, or change that firmware. Instead, I ordered the Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX210 card and replaced it. It took me less than five minutes to replace it and it all worked better.

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