BusyBoredom

I have been doing a bit of compute work on nixos with both AMD and nvidia, and I’d say it depends on what you’re doing.

If you’re doing your compute via compute shaders, you’ll have a great experience on AMD. Zero hiccups for me, I just wrote my shaders and ran them no problem. Vulkan is incredible.

If you have to interact with other people’s compute crap though, it might be a bad time. Most folks do GPU compute with cuda, and that won’t be fun for you on AMD. Yes there are translation layers, and you can make them work for some use cases, but its a bad experience. And yeah rocm exists… but does it really? Not many cards actually support rocm, and software support for it is just as sparse.

It seems to be getting a little better lately, but historically they just didn’t give firmware updates. I went 3 years without a stable bios update for my 12th gen Intel mainboard on linux despite known vulnerabilities since launch (just got its first update last month).

I actually upgraded my mainboard within that time, so I went the full lifetime of the product with an insecure BIOS and none of the firmware improvements that were promised at launch like thunderbolt 4 certification. For all practical purposes, firmware support ended when it left the factory until just last month.

That said, my new ryzen ai 350 main board just got its first update to patch some vulns that were disclosed a month ago. So still not in time for the coordinated disclosure, but a month is way better than 3 years so I’ll take what I can get.

And the poor firmware support

Correct they do not, there are components on some models (like the 12th gen) that they do not support updating using fwupd. You must use either EFI updater or update from windows to get the full update on those platforms.

Unfortunately no, that is only for installation via windows. There is no Linux updater for it. Still no stable update on Linux for the 12th gen :(

Edit: oh nice actually I see they added an EFI updater! That’s great progress :) so I stand corrected – 3 years after launch, it got its first and only stable update on linux! Thanks for the correction.

Not trying to be disingenuous, I have a framework 13 and I love it. Just pointing out some real tradeoffs with it that folks ought to be made aware of.

You can get a lenovo or a dell or something else with the same specs for cheaper if you’re willing to give up repairability. I’m not, so I have a framework, but that’s not everyone.

For firmware support, the 12 gen frameworks still haven’t received a single stable update on Linux since launch despite known vulnerabilities. That’s an ongoing issue, its not fixed. For some people in security a critical environments, that’s a deal breaker. Similarly the 13th gen only got 1 stable update on linux and the ryzen 300s (which I have now) again have started to get vulns reported but no patches yet.

Most vendors patch vulnerabilities according to the coordinated disclosure, and framework doesn’t. Not saying framework is the devil or anything, just that there’s a real tradeoff for some people.

Some caveats on the framework recommendation:

• Its value proposition is in its repairability and upgradeability. You save money by repairing and upgrading the existing laptop later instead of buying a new one. If you don’t like tinkering, its not a great value.
• Framework does not provide firmware support. Most framework mainboards only receive one or two firmware updates within the normal lifespan of a device. So if you need a secure bios, framework is not an option.
• The actual performance per dollar of framework laptops the day you buy them is poor. A lenovo or a dell will beat it in perf/$ anyday.Frameworks laptops are only attractive perf/$ wise later when you start benefiting from cheap upgrades.