It's been good for me; I think it'll be great soon. AMD support on Linux is the biggest issue.
The upgrade experience from the Intel 12th gen to a Ryzen 5 took about a half-hour, doing only the mainboard and no display or hinge upgrades, and I was already familiar with the internals from assembling it as a DIY. It's not trivially easy, and there were a few frustrating moments that aren't unique to the Framework (ok, I'm just talking about the goddamned wifi antenna connections), but I've had a harder time upgrading or repairing just the RAM or storage on some ultrathin laptops.
The firmware limitations on ports imposed by AMD are frustrating in concept but less so in practice; for me it meant just swapping expansion cards from the rear slots to the front slots. I can imagine for people who had very specific setups it could be more disruptive.
But the OS experience was sloppy, and I'm not surprised that Phoronix waited until Fedora 39 left beta. AMD GPU issues necessitated kernel patches that wouldn't land in Fedora 38 by launch, and I still hit GPU-related memalloc issues with the updated kernel _and_ the BIOS update that Phoronix also waited for.[1] I've also hit the wake-while-lid-closed problems specific to the AMD mainboard that have onerous udev workarounds.[2]
The weird power supply limitations for using the board standalone, requiring at least a 100W supply for still less than full performance unless any battery is attached, also limits the flexibility that makes these boards attractive outside of the laptop case, whether bought for that intent or as a post-upgrade reuse.
From my experience, it takes about a year between the time AMD hardware is generally available to the public and the time Linux support for it is rock solid.
I got one of the first 6800U laptops available and at the beginning it was rough, crashing often for no reasons. Slowly, each new kernel or firmware version fixed more and more things until one day, about a year later, all issues were gone.
I bought my Asus 1215B back in 2009, naturally it had the AMD proprietary driver back then, it took until Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for me to get OpenGL 4.1 support back, now with the open source driver.
It had been downgraded to OpenGL 3.3 since Ubuntu decided to drop the proprietary driver.
Wifi antenna. Damn. Align the connector with the socket. Push it forward/up then press down into the socket. I did a replacement once and I was about to break it until I saw a few videos and a text description of it.
Just did my own swap yesterday: I was lazy (practical?) and just kept the Intel wifi chip I had already so I wouldn't have to redo the antenna connections.
I'm on Ubuntu 23.10 and I think just the pretty new kernel, plus my Framework board being a later build with the newer firmware, meant I dodged any graphics issues (at least any I'd have immediately noticed).
> The weird power supply limitations for using the board standalone, requiring at least a 100W supply for still less than full performance unless any battery is attached, also limits the flexibility that makes these boards attractive outside of the laptop case, whether bought for that intent or as a post-upgrade reuse.
That's because Framework doesn't want to risk getting liable for damaged power supplies. With a battery, the power management circuitry can make sure that, bar an outright shortcut, the load on the PSU will not ever be more than the allowed power. Without it, there is no buffer.
You're not wrong, but the problem is a difference in capability combined with a performance cap that you can't power-scale your way out of.
The 100W suggestion is the same as the Intel board, though the Intel board can run standalone on the stock 60W supply without a battery by staying in a lower-wattage mode. The 100W problem specific to AMD is the inability to boot at all without a battery at under 100W, and not being able to hit max stock TDP with a 100W or greater supply unless a battery is also installed — even if it never draws from it.
From Framework's emails to early-batch buyers on the subject:
> Note that performance will currently be limited without the battery present. We’re working with AMD and our manufacturing partner Compal to tune and improve this. In the meantime, we recommend using a 100W USB-C power adapter to mitigate some of the performance reduction.
Most of the improvement is in gaming and GPU-intensive work, which is why I upgraded. Baldur's Gate 3 via Steam/Proton at 1240p went from ~30 fps with settings cranked down on Intel to 40-60 at high/ultra.
I didn't upgrade the battery and the battery life is similar (as in, not great; about 4-5 hours of coding while occasionally maxing all cores, 2 hours or less of sustained gaming), but it's also hard to judge because of all the power/wake problems while in sleep. I've gotten in the habit of just shutting it down instead.
Blender was "usable" on Intel but I can work comfortably with much bigger scenes on the AMD board. I had 32GB RAM on both boards, going from DDR4 to DDR5 by necessity.
Anecdotally, non-GPU single/multi-core stuff (for me, typically GIS-related functions) feels better but not by as huge of a leap.
> When we go from S0i3 to S0ix, the EC will send some dummy key presses to the host so the keyboard will keep working. This may cause the host to wake up to screen on, and stay there.
Which is what spawned the udev workarounds of just disabling wake-on-keyboard altogether, which solves for both the lid and AC connection incorrectly waking from sleep.
Which is onerous because wake-on-keyboard is a pretty common thing to want enabled on a laptop! It's not the end of the world, just another "yeah, I'm using Linux" moment.
Wow, that's fantastic. I have the 12th-gen board (bought it, along with the full Framework laptop, when they started offering it), and gaming perf is ok for what I play, but not great. There are a few other issues (like severe spurious thermal throttling) that make gaming even harder (not great to be playing a FPS and suddenly all 20 cores are locked to 400MHz and stay that way for 15 minutes for no reason).
I get shit battery life (~3 hours), probably because I have 30 Firefox windows open with a total of 2k tabs or so (my fault, I should clean it up), so at least one core is at 25% or so all the time, or worse. And of course compiling things or watching video drags that down real fast.
I can't justify another upgrade after having this one for only a year (especially since I'll need new RAM), but maybe I'll think about an AMD board in 2025 or so.
It still won't replace my 2021 ROG G14 with a RTX 3060 and Win11 as my "main gaming" laptop, but it's very nice when I'm traveling to use the same laptop for work and play. Slower strategy games like BG3 on a high-res 3:2 display are a revelation, too, when the UI adapts well.
I am very surprised to hear reports of poor Linux support for AMD devices. I recently purchased a GPD Win Max 2 [1] and a GPD Win 4 [2] for work. Both devices are AMD 7840U with Radeon 780M (and 64 GiB RAM at 6400 MT/s since I saw what appeared to be instability at 7500 MT/s.)
I installed Archlinux on both and the support has been very solid with the `linux-lts` kernel and only one kernel flag (`amd_pstate=guided`.)
The following work: touchscreen; suspend (s2idle, which correctly enters S0ix state giving ≥100h battery life suspended but requiring I disable entries in `/proc/acpi/wakeup`); audio; media keys; game controls; wifi; Bluetooth; USB; SecureBoot (with `systemd-boot`); webcam (available only on Win Max 2.) The TPM2 works, but I haven't done anything with it yet (and it's an fTPM.)
Battery life is quite good (8~10h with the `acpi-cpufreq` `powersave` governor.) If I dial down the TDP, I can eke out even more battery life than that. If I dial it up to performance, I get 1~2h of battery life (and the exhaust from the fan port runs very hot.) I plan to try the `amd_pstate` governor (kernel flag `amd_pstate=active`) once support is available in the LTS kernel, though I like being able to control TDP via the CLI with AUR packages like `ryzenadj-git`. (This sounds like a lot of work, but I have a short shell script where I dialed in the right `cpupower` and `ryzenadj-git` commands optimal for my use.)
Hibernate works perfectly on the Win 4; I haven't tested it on the Win Max 2 (since s2idle works so well!)
On the Win 4, I can't get `xrandr` modes at anything other than native resolution (1920×1080) to work, but I am content with scaling via `xrandr --scale-from`. All resolutions display properly on the Win Max 2. Rotation works perfectly on both devices, but I rotate manually (and I haven't bothered to see if there is a gyroscope sensor.) There is minimal to no screen tearing. The displays present to the OS as landscape (i.e., rotation is not necessary from the Linux console.)
The only hardware that outright doesn't work are the fingerprint readers (but I believe Linux support for fingerprint readers is limited to very few devices.)
In short, my recent experience with AMD 7840U/Radeon 780M has been nothing short of amazing, and these devices have been an absolute pleasure to use.
Framework's been transparent through the process about firmware issues being part of their mainboard development. A lot of their problems are specific to the intersection of their expansion slot/USB-C port capabilities, particularly power draw and PD/DP capabilities, and AMD's firmware for mainboard components. I'm not surprised that GPDs have a more solid experience as they're not expected to be as flexible.
And I want to emphasize that the "support" as in Framework responding to and shipping fixes has been good. The "support" as in the hardware working consistently, particularly in Linux and without distro-specific workarounds, has had holes which sound common enough outside of Framework devices that I'd wager the GPDs are the exception more than the rule.
I'll say at least that the Framework's fingerprint reader and display settings Just Worked through the upgrade.
My assumption prior to purchasing these devices was that AMD support would be the main reason for me returning them.
I was quite surprised to see just how well everything worked, and, in fact, these devices have given me much less trouble than my i7-1165G7 Dell XPS 13".
In fact, these devices has worked so well that it's really made me more excited about consumer technology and new laptops and portables than I have been in a long time!
I am worried that I may be mistakenly generalising this to all AMD devices. I have even been considering ditching Intel for my next laptop upgrade…
>> The weird power supply limitations for using the board standalone, requiring at least a 100W supply for still less than full performance unless any battery is attached, also limits the flexibility
What? I've been thinking about a VISA mounted PC on the back of my TV. This board seems like a great idea, but 100W for a laptop board? Why? Are there some transients that need more than some caps can supply?
There are community threads with details — there are more things to worry about than just the power supply, but it's the biggest and weirdest one. The AMD boards also don't ship with a RTC battery for regulatory reasons, and they use a two-pin connector instead of a bare coin cell. There are further port limitations for connecting a display when no OS is installed or the mainboard wasn't initialized in the laptop case.
The Intel boards also recommended 100W if there's no battery; the AMD issue is that _even with_ a 100W supply, performance is capped, and with a smaller power supply you might not be able to boot at all.
It's not just a matter of poor drivers and not being able to wake up from sleep. You typical Mac lasts for tens of hours on battery and runs faster than Intel/AMD's flagship laptop grade processors. This is a big deal and if the x64 hardware people don't up their game soon, the Linux on desktop community will be hurt as users would move to the Apple ecosystem, despite the non-free nature. The gap has grown too big.
> the Linux on desktop community will be hurt as users would move to the Apple ecosystem, despite the non-free nature.
That's an odd thing to say given given GNU/Linux runs on more architectures than any other OS. For example there is a Chromebook, which is (or is slated to become?) a skin over GNU/Linux. That includes using Wayland. If you want access to the full GNU/Linux stack, Chromebook's provide Crostini.
Your point about Apple pulling off a step change with the M series is correct of course, and Asahi Linux notwithstanding we don't have full access to it. But other hardware vendors see that as an opportunity - if they can produce an equivalent they can take advantage of the fact that Apple produces a premium product most of the world doesn't want to pay for. When they do, GNU/Linux users will be among the early adopters.
It's difficult to see how be GNU/Linux could get left behind. AMD/Intel on the other hand are likely shitting themselves. They've now had years to catch up, but has been very little sign of it. That mountain of technical debt created by the necessity of backward compatibility is proving very hard to move. The are starting to look like dinosaurs that are pretty safe in their niche, but the world has moved on and that niche is shrinking.
> So? Any other architecture that outperforms the M3 on both efficiency and power?
No that I know of.
But that wasn't disputing that. I was commenting on your speculation the open source community would flee to a closed source operating system because the M3 currently reins supreme. I doubt they will. I also doubt M gap will Apple's engineers created will be a long term thing.
At the risk of sounding negative I have to dissent. Linux on the Framework is great *if* you use GNOME or KDE. Those two DE's specifically support Fractional scaling in Wayland the best
I've been using XFCE for the better part of 15 years meanwhile. Its Wayland support is a permanent unfortunate "work-in-progress" (apparently they only have two full-time developers for the whole project?) and I'd assume many other less popular desktop environments are in a similar bucket
The Framework is a fantastic laptop and a joy to use even under Windows 11. I don't hold its XFCE issues against Framework, but it's worth remembering that "Linux on the Desktop" isn't a single monolith
> I've been using XFCE for the better part of 15 years meanwhile.
Nice, nearly 20 years for me.
> (apparently they only have two full-time developers for the whole project?)
We actually have zero full time developers. I'm probably the closest thing to a full-time developer as I have a lot of free time on my hands these days, but even then I don't work on Xfce enough to call it full time. And we only have two people working on Wayland support, and so that's even less than the non-full-time each of us put in.
> Its Wayland support is a permanent unfortunate "work-in-progress"
We've probably made more progress in the past 6 months than all the time prior, combined. Things are coming along, but it'll probably be another 1-2 years before it's usable, and only "stable" in time for the 4.22.0 release at the end of 2026. And that's still all aspirational; it may not materialize in that time.
It turns out that the Wayland protocol is super limited, and a lot of things that you could do easily on X11 you essentially have to re-invent from scratch. And that's before we even talk about turning xfwm4 into a Wayland compositor. (Some rando has forked xfwm4 and is building a Wayland compositor with it, but has chosen not to collaborate with us at all, so it's unclear if their work will ever be mergeable.)
But that's what happens when you're a developer for a software project that has no corporate sponsorship or people hired specifically to work on it. Feel free to contribute; we could definitely use the help!
Anyhow: I run Xfce on a Framework 13, and it's fine. I've set UI scaling to 2x, and I've added a custom modeline to X11 for 2712x1805 (1.2x native). Big downside is apparently this turns off the iGPU's ability to eliminate tearing. I suspect there's a way to fix that, but I haven't had the motivation to dig into it (I wonder if simply using a more-even scaling factor like 1.25 would do it, even if things would appear a little smaller than I'd like).
> I'm probably the closest thing to a full-time developer...
I just want to say thanks, your work is very much appreciated!
> I run Xfce on a Framework 13
Do you do much gaming or 3D stuff? I have a Framework 13 AMD running NixOS (Kernel 6.6 and BIOS 3.03) and its performance is great in desktop apps, but simple games seem to really work it. And by "simple" I'm talking about Everquest Titanium that runs smooth as butter via PoL on an i3-7100U (Xubuntu 18.04), and also Wobbly Life that runs happily on a Lenovo with Ryzen 4500U (Windows 11). Both of those games cause my FW 13 to spin fans up like crazy after a couple mins and sound like it's going to take-off. I'm trying to figure out if I'm missing something from my NixOS setup, because I feel like its performance should be better.
I've been using X11 on my Framework laptop for years. No desktop environment at all. Just my regular old school window manager[1]. No KDE or GNOME. But also no XFCE.
The only thing I had to do to get scaling working for me was set two environment variables[2].
I was indeed worried about this when I bought the laptop. Prior to this, I avoided anything with resolutions higher than 1920x1200. But it turned out that everything mostly worked with a couple tweaks.
I think the only real issue I've run into is `git gui`. As I understand it, the GUI toolkit it uses doesn't support scaling? Not sure. I ended up working around it by just increasing font sizes. I suppose this exposes the weakness that is probably impacting you: the scaling on my laptop is being done by the GUI toolkits, not the display server or compositor. (I don't always run a compositor, but when I do, I use `picom`. Mostly just to avoid tearing.)
I'm using i3wm and maybe I've been doing scaling wrong, but I've only needed to set Xft.dpi and one setting in Polybar (because it doesn't read Xft.dpi) to scale everything toba comfortable size.
The solution I've been pretty happy with instead of Wayland fractional scaling is to have scaling set at 1:1 and use GDK_DPI_SCALE (I think that's the one) at 1.5 or 1.25 or whatever. Things like Firefox, Chrome, the standard GTK system apps will scale nicely, and stuff that doesn't support it will just be small instead of doing a blurry zoom.
Agreed. I struggled a bit with XFCE on my Framework for a few months before switching to GNOME, largely because Framework's display size is best with fractional scaling. 100% made everything too small, and I could work with 200% and some tweaks (although some applications didn't play nicely at all), but 175% or 150% is perfect. Their choice of display size is one reason (among several) why Framework is really not Linux-first.
I admittedly just got my Framework a couple of days ago, but I found scaling the text size to be sufficient in quite a lot of cases, at least for me, in XFCE.
I'm running NixOS + KDE on the AMD framework and surprisingly it worked perfectly out of the box. All I had to do was disable secure boot to get it running, and after install I had to configure the global scale in display settings to 200% so it looked right. No weird hacks needed at all -- the 23.05 installer just worked, including wifi, which apparently isn't true for Windows 11.
I'm running this laptop (the R5 variant) on Arch w/ i3 and it's been pretty great so far. High DPI screen isn't really a huge deal as long as you set Xft.dpi correctly and change your terminal/i3bar font size.
I got a unit from batch one and experienced some gpu issues and sleep/wake issues, but they went away after updating to bios v3.03. It's been fine since then.
Mediatek wifi is basically as good as the ax210 in my 12th gen.
The CPU uplift over the 12th gen i7 is immense. I foolishly forgot to do before/after compilation times on my usual projects, but in general things seem to build significantly faster (Medium-Large sized Typescript + Rust codebase). My workloads also don't seem to get the new cpu as hot as my 12th gen intel cpu got.
Oddly specific question, but can anybody confirm whether the AX210 (no vPro) wifi works with the AMD motherboards? I've seen some pretty bad reports about the realtek chip they're defaulting to on the AMD systems, and I already have the AX210, so if I could just keep using it, that would be ideal.
I haven't seen issues bringing over an AX210 but I've barely used it so I'll have to keep an eye out for that.
I think just in its own right there are some AX210 Linux driver issues, particularly with 6E connectivity; I don't have a 6E network so I haven't really noticed.
I would love to be able to get a FM 13, but the non-inverted-t layout of the arrow keys make it a non-starter. It was the one thing I loathed the most about the butterfly keyboards on those MacBook Pros that came with them, and I find it a baffling choice to make on purpose today considering it was a major complaint on those Macs. I cannot move my hand to those keys by feel alone if the side arrows are twice the height of the up and down arrows.
I can wait and pay extra for a FM 16, but I don't need the extra size or weight for what for me is going to be a secondary machine. And sadly, the topcase and keyboard seem to be an area where the "hackability" and "openness" of the hardware platform don't exist, so I can't even homebrew my own solution.
I really prefer the half-height "T" layout in those size constraints but some people really hate it. It's an oddity to me: as you say, I'd be happier being able to easily feel out the layout and having all directions be the same size targets. Other than just not having the "look" of empty space I don't feel that there's really anything to recommend the "full height left/right, half-height up/down" layout.
I wonder if you'll have more ability to play around in that space with the 16, as its top case is more modular. Part of the problem with the Framework 13 input cover is that the cover including the key gaps is all one piece of aluminum, so things have to work within those sized holes, or else involve a completely different input cover.
(Edit: the 16 does I think have more theoretical room for alternate keyboard layouts, but of course that's assuming anyone makes them. More importantly, it just has the inverted T layout on the regular keyboard already.)
6-7 hours of browsing in Firefox, 4-5 hours when doing work involving occasional building/compiling, 3-5 hours of 2D native Linux gaming, 2 hours or less of 3D AAA gaming through Steam/Proton.
Luckily there are battery stats. On a 7840U with power-profiles-daemon installed and PCI power saving turned on (but not wifi or audio power saving, or VM writebacks, I don't feel those are worth the power savings), it draws 3W if I'm doing absolutely nothing with the screen on its dimmest setting (I mostly use the laptop in bed at night), and 5-11W while web browsing on Firefox.
It goes up to about 13W while watching youtube, even though it claims hardware accelerated video decoding is on.
well it's new battery feel so far, just got the machine less than two weeks ago. Haven't done any long battery-related work yet. My previous Dell XPS13 had the battery puff out and it actually wrecked the mainboard in doing so, so I'll be watching out for any negative experiences like that here, that I can open the machine right up in 30 seconds to attend to issues like that should be a plus.
Yes they work (plasma 5 KDE on arch). On the 55Wh battery with a 7840U, it loses 2-3% per hour when asleep, so I set up suspend-then-hibernate after an hour (though setting that up was a pain in itself).
Does the pressure to click on the trackpad feel 'even' across the entire trackpad? For example, does clicking at the top feel the same as the bottom? That's something I never got used to on my ThinkPad, clicking on the top is basically impossible.
Nope. It's a mechanical trackpad with similar pressure issues (super stiff in the top corners, a little softer in the top center, best in the center and bottom). I switched to tap-to-click.
IMO not close (I spend the majority of the day on my work macbook). It's especially apparent when scrolling or moving the pointer small amounts, and especially near the edges of the trackpad, where you need to make bigger movements for it to work.
Your mileage may vary as people have different sized fingers and such.
It's a far cry even from my old Google Pixelbook, which is a (distant) second best touchpad I've used.
Besides the actual hardware, I think the biggest problem is the software implementation of trackpads in Linux (at least in libinput/Wayland). Even running Linux on my Macbook, the trackpad experience is vastly inferior to macOS.
I don't care too much about gestures, but mostly about stable palm rejection and proper acceleration curves. The current implementations sadly provide neither.
One of my complaints with the older framework is that the trackpad scrolling is REALLY fast and AFAICT there's no way to change tbe speed on stock Fedora
very similar. One would think they're on a macbook when using this laptop. I have it set to use "area" for left/right click and it works better than my older macbookpro where the trackpad had lost some of its responsiveness at some point.
I have a thinkpad also from work and I've never liked thinkpad keyboards, and I especially never liked the trackpad-buttons-on-top thing (it's a key reason I dont use thinkpads normally). I've been through several thinkpads ( as we have to swap out every few years) and while they get nicer each time, they still carry along that old-school "lets have lots and lots of small keys" thing.
Framework's keyboard OTOH is very similar to a macbookpro, keys feel a little higher and more tactile and also the layout is simpler than how my thinkpad has them laid out.
truth be told im mostly using an external keyboard so far, havent really gone anywhere w/ the laptop yet.
I don’t have a Thinkpad, but the plastic surface of the keyboard feels like a slight step down from other keyboards I’ve used (like my Logitech MX Keys). It’s not as smooth — the plastic of the key is rough, almost chalkboard-like.
I haven’t used it in-depth enough to determine any pet peeves about the layout. But overall, I like it.
If anyone ever offers an upgraded key cap set, I might go for it.
I went straight for fedora 39. The two issues I had were 1. the initial BIOS update hung, and I had to run it again - elsewhere, someone who had this problem had reported that it bricked their machine, however I was able to get through it: https://www.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/17jzj40/bios_upd...
Thank you for sharing your experience and fixes. Sounds straight forward to fix, although a bit disappointing that they don’t put the effort to supply kernel patches to make it work out of the box, particularly for a laptop that claims to be diy friendly. To be fair, i’d rate it 3/5 based on people experience with it.
Fellow batch 8er! I got the 8-core AMD option, super excited. My 2016 Razer finally shat the bed after I attempted to clean the keyboard...now it "turns on" but the fans don't spin and the BIOS never loads. I read it might be the fuses on the motherboard, but I tested them all and continuity is fine. I was originally a bit hesitant to go from a GPU-enabled laptop back to integrated, but realized that almost all the games I played on my laptop didn't need a GPU anyway. My Razer battery would blow up every once in a while and I suspected it had to do with the excessive heat of gaming, so I stopped pushing it.
In the meantime I got my desktop set up again (was stuck on Windows 7, now on linux) and got some horrible Asus laptop for when I'm not at my desk.
The only thing I'm worried about is all of my current setup is on X and it seems for any real display scaling that Wayland is the way to go, so I'm not excited about switching everything over (I'm on i3 and probably a few other tools/scripts that rely solely on X). I guess we'll see how it works out.
Wish they were including a Macbook Air with Asahi Linux running on it. Nowadays you can get an M1 for $750 on sale or an M2 for $900. Even though these are the 8GB models only they are very much comparable to the review models in the test.
It's not fair to be comparing it with the passively cooled and throttled Macbook Air. The Acer Swift Edge is a 16" twin fan air cooled machine. You should compare it to the top of the line MBP for a fair benchmark without thermal throttling concerns.
You could order the (black) blank one and ordering an engraving at a repair shop? (I have slightly esoteric keyboard-layout needs and I’m thinking about it, although my last experience with engraving wasn’t the most positive.)
I don't know what that means. I want ÅÄÖ and/or ÅÆØ on my keyboard out of box. I don't want to use stickers, I don't want to guess, I don't want to engrave things.
I do really want the Framework 13 though, it seems a perfect size.
I mean no offense, but are you not a touch typer? Labels are for training the fingers in the early stages of typing but devs should not be looking down once they've trained their fingers, which shouldn't take more than a year of practice.
As far as I know there are mainly two (but there may be more out there) keyboard standards, ANSI and ISO, that define the size and proportions of the physical keys.
Icelandic keyboard layouts for instance use ISO, and so what I meant with my previous comment was that other Nordic layouts would too.
In that sense, Framework has what you need.
But labels are a different story, so in that regard they do not.
Like the other commenter wrote: there's two standards. If you know how to touch-type, just set the virtual layout to whatever language you want: your fingers already know the rest.
The upgrade experience from the Intel 12th gen to a Ryzen 5 took about a half-hour, doing only the mainboard and no display or hinge upgrades, and I was already familiar with the internals from assembling it as a DIY. It's not trivially easy, and there were a few frustrating moments that aren't unique to the Framework (ok, I'm just talking about the goddamned wifi antenna connections), but I've had a harder time upgrading or repairing just the RAM or storage on some ultrathin laptops.
The firmware limitations on ports imposed by AMD are frustrating in concept but less so in practice; for me it meant just swapping expansion cards from the rear slots to the front slots. I can imagine for people who had very specific setups it could be more disruptive.
But the OS experience was sloppy, and I'm not surprised that Phoronix waited until Fedora 39 left beta. AMD GPU issues necessitated kernel patches that wouldn't land in Fedora 38 by launch, and I still hit GPU-related memalloc issues with the updated kernel _and_ the BIOS update that Phoronix also waited for.[1] I've also hit the wake-while-lid-closed problems specific to the AMD mainboard that have onerous udev workarounds.[2]
The weird power supply limitations for using the board standalone, requiring at least a 100W supply for still less than full performance unless any battery is attached, also limits the flexibility that makes these boards attractive outside of the laptop case, whether bought for that intent or as a post-upgrade reuse.
1: https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-graphical-corruption...
2: https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-framework-amd-ryzen-...