Advice for buyers Those are things I wish I would have known before buying:

1. consider buying 4 USB-C expansion cards, or at least a mix of 4 USB-A or USB-C cards, as they use less power than other cards and you do want to fill those expansion slots otherwise they snag around and feel insecure
2. you will likely need a dock or at least a USB hub if you want a two-monitor setup, otherwise you'll run out of ports
3. you have to do some serious tuning to get proper (10h+ idle, 10 days suspend) power savings
4. in particular, beware that the HDMI, DisplayPort and particularly the SSD and MicroSD cards take a significant amount power, even when sleeping, up to 2-6W for the latter two
5. beware that the MicroSD card is what it says: Micro, normal SD cards won't fit, and while there might be full sized one eventually, it's currently only at the prototyping stage
6. the Framework monitor has an unusual aspect ratio (3:2): I like it (and it matches classic and digital photography aspect ratio), but it might surprise you

Current status I have the framework! It's setup with a fresh new Debian bookworm installation. I've ran through a large number of tests and burn in. I have decided to use the Framework as my daily driver, and had to buy a USB-C dock to get my two monitors connected, which was own adventure. Update: Framework just (2023-03-23) just announced a whole bunch of new stuff:

• AMD Ryzen 7040 and 13th gen Intel board
• 16" laptop version (pre-order) with an expansion "bay" for an upgradeable graphics module which could also fit M.2 storage
• audio expansion card, since the 16 laptop doesn't have a combo jack
• official mainboard case (back-ordered)
• official battery case (no site yet)
• new bezel colors, including transluscent, green, purple and red (back-ordered)
• new, louder (80dB) speakers
• new 61Wh battery
• matte display
• new hinge

The recording is available in this video and it's not your typical keynote. It starts ~25 minutes late, audio is crap, lightning and camera are crap, clapping seems to be from whatever staff they managed to get together in a room, decor is bizarre, colors are shit. It's amazing.

Specifications Those are the specifications of the 12th gen, in general terms. Your build will of course vary according to your needs.

• CPU: i5-1240P, i7-1260P, or i7-1280P (Up to 4.4-4.8 GHz, 4+8 cores), Iris Xe graphics
• Storage: 250-4000GB NVMe (or bring your own)
• Memory: 8-64GB DDR4-3200 (or bring your own)
• WiFi 6e (AX210, vPro optional, or bring your own)
• 296.63mm X 228.98mm X 15.85mm, 1.3Kg
• 13.5" display, 3:2 ratio, 2256px X 1504px, 100% sRGB, >400 nit
• 4 x USB-C user-selectable expansion ports, including
  • USB-C
  • USB-A
  • HDMI
  • DP
  • Ethernet
  • MicroSD
  • 250-1000GB SSD
• 3.5mm combo headphone jack
• Kill switches for microphone and camera
• Battery: 55Wh
• Camera: 1080p 60fps
• Biometrics: Fingerprint Reader
• Backlit keyboard
• Power Adapter: 60W USB-C (or bring your own)
• ships with a screwdriver/spludger
• 1 year warranty
• base price: 1000$CAD, but doesn't give you much, typical builds around 1500-2000$CAD

Actual build This is the actual build I ordered. Amounts in CAD. (1CAD = ~0.75EUR/USD.)

Base configuration

• CPU: Intel Core i5-1240P (AKA Alder Lake P 8 4.4GHz P-threads, 8 3.2GHz E-threads, 16 total, 28-64W), 1079$
• Memory: 16GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-3200, 104$

Customization

• Keyboard: US English, included

Expansion Cards

• 2 USB-C $24
• 3 USB-A $36
• 2 HDMI $50
• 1 DP $50
• 1 MicroSD $25
• 1 Storage 1TB $199
• Sub-total: 384$

Accessories

• Power Adapter - US/Canada $64.00

Total

• Before tax: 1606$
• After tax and duties: 1847$
• Free shipping

Quick evaluation This is basically the TL;DR: here, just focusing on broad pros/cons of the laptop.

Pros

• easily repairable (complete with QR codes pointing to repair guides!), the 11th gen received a 10/10 score from ifixit.com, which they call "exceedingly rare", the 12th gen has a similar hardware design and would probably rate similarly
• replaceable motherboard!!! can be reused as a NUC-like device, with a 3d-printed case, 12th gen board can be bought standalone and retrofitted into an 11th gen case
• not a passing fad: they made a first laptop with the 11th gen Intel chipset in 2021, and a second motherboard with the 12th Intel chipset in 2022
• four modular USB-C ports which can fit HDMI, USB-C (pass-through, can provide power on both sides), USB-A, DisplayPort, MicroSD, external storage (250GB, 1TB), active modding community
• nice power led indicating power level (charging, charged, etc) when plugged
• test account on fwupd.org, "expressed interest to port to coreboot" (according to the Fedora developer) and are testing firmware updates over fwupd, present on LVFS testing, but including for the 12th gen, latest BIOS (3.06) was shipped through LVFS
• excellent documentation of the (proprietary) BIOS
• explicit Linux support with install guides, although you'll have to live with a bit of proprietary firmware, and not everything works correctly
• the 11th gen had good reviews: Ars Technica, Fedora developer, iFixit teardown, phoronix, amazing keyboard and touch pad, according to Linux After Dark, most exciting laptops I've ever broken (Cory Doctorow) ; more critical review from an OpenBSD developer
• the EC (Embedded Controller) is open source so of course people are hacking at it, some documentation on what's possible (e.g. changing LED colors, fan curves, etc), see also

Cons

• the 11th gen is out of stock, except for the higher-end CPUs, which are much less affordable (700$+)
• the 12th gen has compatibility issues with Debian, followup in the DebianOn page, but basically: brightness hotkeys, power management, wifi, the webcam is okay even though the chipset is the infamous alder lake because it does not have the fancy camera; most issues currently seem solvable, and upstream is working with mainline to get their shit working
• 12th gen might have issues with thunderbolt docks
• they used to have some difficulty keeping up with the orders: first two batches shipped, third batch sold out, fourth batch should have shipped in October 2021. they generally seem to keep up with shipping. update (august 2022): they rolled out a second line of laptops (12th gen), first batch shipped, second batch shipped late, September 2022 batch was generally on time, see this spreadsheet for a crowdsourced effort to track those supply chain issues seem to be under control as of early 2023. I got the Ethernet expansion card shipped within a week.
• compared to my previous laptop (Purism Librem 13v4), it feels strangely bulkier and heavier; it's actually lighter than the purism (1.3kg vs 1.4kg) and thinner (15.85mm vs 18mm) but the design of the Purism laptop (tapered edges) makes it feel thinner
• no space for a 2.5" drive
• rather bright LED around power button, but can be dimmed in the BIOS (not low enough to my taste) I got used to it
• fan quiet when idle, but can be noisy when running, for example if you max a CPU for a while
• battery described as "mediocre" by Ars Technica (above), confirmed poor in my tests (see below)
• no RJ-45 port, and attempts at designing ones are failing because the modular plugs are too thin to fit (according to Linux After Dark), so unlikely to have one in the future Update: they cracked that nut and ship an 2.5 gbps Ethernet expansion card with a realtek chipset, without any firmware blob
• a bit pricey for the performance, especially when compared to the competition (e.g. Dell XPS, Apple M1)
• 12th gen Intel has glitchy graphics, seems like Intel hasn't fully landed proper Linux support for that chipset yet

Initial hardware setup A breeze.

Accessing the board The internals are accessed through five TorX screws, but there's a nice screwdriver/spudger that works well enough. The screws actually hold in place so you can't even lose them. The first setup is a bit counter-intuitive coming from the Librem laptop, as I expected the back cover to lift and give me access to the internals. But instead the screws is release the keyboard and touch pad assembly, so you actually need to flip the laptop back upright and lift the assembly off to get access to the internals. Kind of scary. I also actually unplugged a connector in lifting the assembly because I lifted it towards the monitor, while you actually need to lift it to the right. Thankfully, the connector didn't break, it just snapped off and I could plug it back in, no harm done. Once there, everything is well indicated, with QR codes all over the place supposedly leading to online instructions.

Bad QR codes Unfortunately, the QR codes I tested (in the expansion card slot, the memory slot and CPU slots) did not actually work so I wonder how useful those actually are. After all, they need to point to something and that means a URL, a running website that will answer those requests forever. I bet those will break sooner than later and in fact, as far as I can tell, they just don't work at all. I prefer the approach taken by the MNT reform here which designed (with the 100 rabbits folks) an actual paper handbook (PDF). The first QR code that's immediately visible from the back of the laptop, in an expansion cord slot, is a 404. It seems to be some serial number URL, but I can't actually tell because, well, the page is a 404. I was expecting that bar code to lead me to an introduction page, something like "how to setup your Framework laptop". Support actually confirmed that it should point a quickstart guide. But in a bizarre twist, they somehow sent me the URL with the plus (+) signs escaped, like this:

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework\+Laptop\+DIY\+Edition\+Quick\+Start\+Guide/57

... which Firefox immediately transforms in:

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework/+Laptop/+DIY/+Edition/+Quick/+Start/+Guide/57

I'm puzzled as to why they would send the URL that way, the proper URL is of course:

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework+Laptop+DIY+Edition+Quick+Start+Guide/57

(They have also "let the team know about this for feedback and help resolve the problem with the link" which is a support code word for "ha-ha! nope! not my problem right now!" Trust me, I know, my own code word is "can you please make a ticket?")

Seating disks and memory The "DIY" kit doesn't actually have that much of a setup. If you bought RAM, it's shipped outside the laptop in a little plastic case, so you just seat it in as usual. Then you insert your NVMe drive, and, if that's your fancy, you also install your own mPCI WiFi card. If you ordered one (which was my case), it's pre-installed. Closing the laptop is also kind of amazing, because the keyboard assembly snaps into place with magnets. I have actually used the laptop with the keyboard unscrewed as I was putting the drives in and out, and it actually works fine (and will probably void your warranty, so don't do that). (But you can.) (But don't, really.)

Hardware review

Keyboard and touch pad The keyboard feels nice, for a laptop. I'm used to mechanical keyboard and I'm rather violent with those poor things. Yet the key travel is nice and it's clickety enough that I don't feel too disoriented. At first, I felt the keyboard as being more laggy than my normal workstation setup, but it turned out this was a graphics driver issues. After enabling a composition manager, everything feels snappy. The touch pad feels good. The double-finger scroll works well enough, and I don't have to wonder too much where the middle button is, it just works. Taps don't work, out of the box: that needs to be enabled in Xorg, with something like this:

cat > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf <<EOF
Section "InputClass"
      Identifier "libinput touch pad catchall"
      MatchIsTouchpad "on"
      MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
      Driver "libinput"
      Option "Tapping" "on"
      Option "TappingButtonMap" "lmr"
EndSection
EOF

But be aware that once you enable that tapping, you'll need to deal with palm detection... So I have not actually enabled this in the end.

Power button The power button is a little dangerous. It's quite easy to hit, as it's right next to one expansion card where you are likely to plug in a cable power. And because the expansion cards are kind of hard to remove, you might squeeze the laptop (and the power key) when trying to remove the expansion card next to the power button. So obviously, don't do that. But that's not very helpful. An alternative is to make the power button do something else. With systemd-managed systems, it's actually quite easy. Add a HandlePowerKey stanza to (say) /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/power-suspends.conf:

[Login]
HandlePowerKey=suspend
HandlePowerKeyLongPress=poweroff

You might have to create the directory first:

mkdir /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/

Then restart logind:

systemctl restart systemd-logind

And the power button will suspend! Long-press to power off doesn't actually work as the laptop immediately suspends... Note that there's probably half a dozen other ways of doing this, see this, this, or that.

Special keybindings There is a series of "hidden" (as in: not labeled on the key) keybindings related to the fn keybinding that I actually find quite useful.

Key	Equivalent	Effect	Command
p	Pause	lock screen	xset s activate
b	Break	?	?
k	ScrLk	switch keyboard layout	N/A

It looks like those are defined in the microcontroller so it would be possible to add some. For example, the SysRq key is almost bound to fn s in there. Note that most other shortcuts like this are clearly documented (volume, brightness, etc). One key that's less obvious is F12 that only has the Framework logo on it. That actually calls the keysym XF86AudioMedia which, interestingly, does absolutely nothing here. By default, on Windows, it opens your browser to the Framework website and, on Linux, your "default media player". The keyboard backlight can be cycled with fn-space. The dimmer version is dim enough, and the keybinding is easy to find in the dark. A skinny elephant would be performed with alt PrtScr (above F11) KEY, so for example alt fn F11 b should do a hard reset. This comment suggests you need to hold the fn only if "function lock" is on, but that's actually the opposite of my experience. Out of the box, some of the fn keys don't work. Mute, volume up/down, brightness, monitor changes, and the airplane mode key all do basically nothing. They don't send proper keysyms to Xorg at all. This is a known problem and it's related to the fact that the laptop has light sensors to adjust the brightness automatically. Somehow some of those keys (e.g. the brightness controls) are supposed to show up as a different input device, but don't seem to work correctly. It seems like the solution is for the Framework team to write a driver specifically for this, but so far no progress since July 2022. In the meantime, the fancy functionality can be supposedly disabled with:

echo 'blacklist hid_sensor_hub'   sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/framework-als-blacklist.conf

... and a reboot. This solution is also documented in the upstream guide. Note that there's another solution flying around that fixes this by changing permissions on the input device but I haven't tested that or seen confirmation it works.

Kill switches The Framework has two "kill switches": one for the camera and the other for the microphone. The camera one actually disconnects the USB device when turned off, and the mic one seems to cut the circuit. It doesn't show up as muted, it just stops feeding the sound. Both kill switches are around the main camera, on top of the monitor, and quite discreet. Then turn "red" when enabled (i.e. "red" means "turned off").

Monitor The monitor looks pretty good to my untrained eyes. I have yet to do photography work on it, but some photos I looked at look sharp and the colors are bright and lively. The blacks are dark and the screen is bright. I have yet to use it in full sunlight. The dimmed light is very dim, which I like.

Screen backlight I bind brightness keys to xbacklight in i3, but out of the box I get this error:

sep 29 22:09:14 angela i3[5661]: No outputs have backlight property

It just requires this blob in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/backlight.conf:

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Card0"
    Driver      "intel"
    Option      "Backlight"  "intel_backlight"
EndSection

This way I can control the actual backlight power with the brightness keys, and they do significantly reduce power usage.

Multiple monitor support I have been able to hook up my two old monitors to the HDMI and DisplayPort expansion cards on the laptop. The lid closes without suspending the machine, and everything works great. I actually run out of ports, even with a 4-port USB-A hub, which gives me a total of 7 ports:

1. power (USB-C)
2. monitor 1 (DisplayPort)
3. monitor 2 (HDMI)
4. USB-A hub, which adds:
5. keyboard (USB-A)
6. mouse (USB-A)
7. Yubikey
8. external sound card

Now the latter, I might be able to get rid of if I switch to a combo-jack headset, which I do have (and still need to test). But still, this is a problem. I'll probably need a powered USB-C dock and better monitors, possibly with some Thunderbolt chaining, to save yet more ports. But that means more money into this setup, argh. And figuring out my monitor situation is the kind of thing I'm not that big of a fan of. And neither is shopping for USB-C (or is it Thunderbolt?) hubs. My normal autorandr setup doesn't work: I have tried saving a profile and it doesn't get autodetected, so I also first need to do:

autorandr -l framework-external-dual-lg-acer

The magic:

autorandr -l horizontal

... also works well. The worst problem with those monitors right now is that they have a radically smaller resolution than the main screen on the laptop, which means I need to reset the font scaling to normal every time I switch back and forth between those monitors and the laptop, which means I actually need to do this:

autorandr -l horizontal &&
eho Xft.dpi: 96   xrdb -merge &&
systemctl restart terminal xcolortaillog background-image emacs &&
i3-msg restart

Kind of disruptive.

Expansion ports I ordered a total of 10 expansion ports. I did manage to initialize the 1TB drive as an encrypted storage, mostly to keep photos as this is something that takes a massive amount of space (500GB and counting) and that I (unfortunately) don't work on very often (but still carry around). The expansion ports are fancy and nice, but not actually that convenient. They're a bit hard to take out: you really need to crimp your fingernails on there and pull hard to take them out. There's a little button next to them to release, I think, but at first it feels a little scary to pull those pucks out of there. You get used to it though, and it's one of those things you can do without looking eventually. There's only four expansion ports. Once you have two monitors, the drive, and power plugged in, bam, you're out of ports; there's nowhere to plug my Yubikey. So if this is going to be my daily driver, with a dual monitor setup, I will need a dock, which means more crap firmware and uncertainty, which isn't great. There are actually plans to make a dual-USB card, but that is blocked on designing an actual board for this. I can't wait to see more expansion ports produced. There's a ethernet expansion card which quickly went out of stock basically the day it was announced, but was eventually restocked. I would like to see a proper SD-card reader. There's a MicroSD card reader, but that obviously doesn't work for normal SD cards, which would be more broadly compatible anyways (because you can have a MicroSD to SD card adapter, but I have never heard of the reverse). Someone actually found a SD card reader that fits and then someone else managed to cram it in a 3D printed case, which is kind of amazing. Still, I really like that idea that I can carry all those little adapters in a pouch when I travel and can basically do anything I want. It does mean I need to shuffle through them to find the right one which is a little annoying. I have an elastic band to keep them lined up so that all the ports show the same side, to make it easier to find the right one. But that quickly gets undone and instead I have a pouch full of expansion cards. Another awesome thing with the expansion cards is that they don't just work on the laptop: anything that takes USB-C can take those cards, which means you can use it to connect an SD card to your phone, for backups, for example. Heck, you could even connect an external display to your phone that way, assuming that's supported by your phone of course (and it probably isn't). The expansion ports do take up some power, even when idle. See the power management section below, and particularly the power usage tests for details.

USB-C charging One thing that is really a game changer for me is USB-C charging. It's hard to overstate how convenient this is. I often have a USB-C cable lying around to charge my phone, and I can just grab that thing and pop it in my laptop. And while it will obviously not charge as fast as the provided charger, it will stop draining the battery at least. (As I wrote this, I had the laptop plugged in the Samsung charger that came with a phone, and it was telling me it would take 6 hours to charge the remaining 15%. With the provided charger, that flew down to 15 minutes. Similarly, I can power the laptop from the power grommet on my desk, reducing clutter as I have that single wire out there instead of the bulky power adapter.) I also really like the idea that I can charge my laptop with a power bank or, heck, with my phone, if push comes to shove. (And vice-versa!) This is awesome. And it works from any of the expansion ports, of course. There's a little led next to the expansion ports as well, which indicate the charge status:

• red/amber: charging
• white: charged
• off: unplugged

I couldn't find documentation about this, but the forum answered. This is something of a recurring theme with the Framework. While it has a good knowledge base and repair/setup guides (and the forum is awesome) but it doesn't have a good "owner manual" that shows you the different parts of the laptop and what they do. Again, something the MNT reform did well. Another thing that people are asking about is an external sleep indicator: because the power LED is on the main keyboard assembly, you don't actually see whether the device is active or not when the lid is closed. Finally, I wondered what happens when you plug in multiple power sources and it turns out the charge controller is actually pretty smart: it will pick the best power source and use it. The only downside is it can't use multiple power sources, but that seems like a bit much to ask.

Multimedia and other devices Those things also work:

• webcam: splendid, best webcam I've ever had (but my standards are really low)
• onboard mic: works well, good gain (maybe a bit much)
• onboard speakers: sound okay, a little metal-ish, loud enough to be annoying, see this thread for benchmarks, apparently pretty good speakers
• combo jack: works, with slight hiss, see below

There's also a light sensor, but it conflicts with the keyboard brightness controls (see above). There's also an accelerometer, but it's off by default and will be removed from future builds.

Combo jack mic tests The Framework laptop ships with a combo jack on the left side, which allows you to plug in a CTIA (source) headset. In human terms, it's a device that has both a stereo output and a mono input, typically a headset or ear buds with a microphone somewhere. It works, which is better than the Purism (which only had audio out), but is on par for the course for that kind of onboard hardware. Because of electrical interference, such sound cards very often get lots of noise from the board. With a Jabra Evolve 40, the built-in USB sound card generates basically zero noise on silence (invisible down to -60dB in Audacity) while plugging it in directly generates a solid -30dB hiss. There is a noise-reduction system in that sound card, but the difference is still quite striking. On a comparable setup (curie, a 2017 Intel NUC), there is also a his with the Jabra headset, but it's quieter, more in the order of -40/-50 dB, a noticeable difference. Interestingly, testing with my Mee Audio Pro M6 earbuds leads to a little more hiss on curie, more on the -35/-40 dB range, close to the Framework. Also note that another sound card, the Antlion USB adapter that comes with the ModMic 4, also gives me pretty close to silence on a quiet recording, picking up less than -50dB of background noise. It's actually probably picking up the fans in the office, which do make audible noises. In other words, the hiss of the sound card built in the Framework laptop is so loud that it makes more noise than the quiet fans in the office. Or, another way to put it is that two USB sound cards (the Jabra and the Antlion) are able to pick up ambient noise in my office but not the Framework laptop. See also my audio page.

Performance tests

Compiling Linux 5.19.11 On a single core, compiling the Debian version of the Linux kernel takes around 100 minutes:

5411.85user 673.33system 1:37:46elapsed 103%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 831700maxresident)k
10594704inputs+87448000outputs (9131major+410636783minor)pagefaults 0swaps

This was using 16 watts of power, with full screen brightness. With all 16 cores (make -j16), it takes less than 25 minutes:

19251.06user 2467.47system 24:13.07elapsed 1494%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 831676maxresident)k
8321856inputs+87427848outputs (30792major+409145263minor)pagefaults 0swaps

I had to plug the normal power supply after a few minutes because battery would actually run out using my desk's power grommet (34 watts). During compilation, fans were spinning really hard, quite noisy, but not painfully so. The laptop was sucking 55 watts of power, steadily:

  Time    User  Nice   Sys  Idle    IO  Run Ctxt/s  IRQ/s Fork Exec Exit  Watts
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
 Average  87.9   0.0  10.7   1.4   0.1 17.8 6583.6 5054.3 233.0 223.9 233.1  55.96
 GeoMean  87.9   0.0  10.6   1.2   0.0 17.6 6427.8 5048.1 227.6 218.7 227.7  55.96
  StdDev   1.4   0.0   1.2   0.6   0.2  3.0 1436.8  255.5 50.0 47.5 49.7   0.20
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
 Minimum  85.0   0.0   7.8   0.5   0.0 13.0 3594.0 4638.0 117.0 111.0 120.0  55.52
 Maximum  90.8   0.0  12.9   3.5   0.8 38.0 10174.0 5901.0 374.0 362.0 375.0  56.41
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Summary:
CPU:  55.96 Watts on average with standard deviation 0.20
Note: power read from RAPL domains: package-0, uncore, package-0, core, psys.
These readings do not cover all the hardware in this device.

memtest86+ I ran Memtest86+ v6.00b3. It shows something like this:

Memtest86+ v6.00b3        12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1240P
CLK/Temp: 2112MHz    78/78 C   Pass  2% #
L1 Cache:   48KB    414 GB/s   Test 46% ##################
L2 Cache: 1.25MB    118 GB/s   Test #3 [Moving inversions, 1s & 0s] 
L3 Cache:   12MB     43 GB/s   Testing: 16GB - 18GB [1GB of 15.7GB]
Memory  :  15.7GB  14.9 GB/s   Pattern: 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU: 4P+8E-Cores (16T)    SMP: 8T (PAR))    Time:  0:27:23  Status: Pass     \
RAM: 1600MHz (DDR4-3200) CAS 22-22-22-51    Pass:  1        Errors: 0
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Memory SPD Information
----------------------
 - Slot 2: 16GB DDR-4-3200 - Crucial CT16G4SFRA32A.C16FP (2022-W23)
                          Framework FRANMACP04
 <ESC> Exit  <F1> Configuration  <Space> Scroll Lock            6.00.unknown.x64

So about 30 minutes for a full 16GB memory test.

Software setup Once I had everything in the hardware setup, I figured, voil , I'm done, I'm just going to boot this beautiful machine and I can get back to work. I don't understand why I am so na ve some times. It's mind boggling. Obviously, it didn't happen that way at all, and I spent the best of the three following days tinkering with the laptop.

Secure boot and EFI First, I couldn't boot off of the NVMe drive I transferred from the previous laptop (the Purism) and the BIOS was not very helpful: it was just complaining about not finding any boot device, without dropping me in the real BIOS. At first, I thought it was a problem with my NVMe drive, because it's not listed in the compatible SSD drives from upstream. But I figured out how to enter BIOS (press F2 manically, of course), which showed the NVMe drive was actually detected. It just didn't boot, because it was an old (2010!!) Debian install without EFI. So from there, I disabled secure boot, and booted a grml image to try to recover. And by "boot" I mean, I managed to get to the grml boot loader which promptly failed to load its own root file system somehow. I still have to investigate exactly what happened there, but it failed some time after the initrd load with:

Unable to find medium containing a live file system

This, it turns out, was fixed in Debian lately, so a daily GRML build will not have this problems. The upcoming 2022 release (likely 2022.10 or 2022.11) will also get the fix. I did manage to boot the development version of the Debian installer which was a surprisingly good experience: it mounted the encrypted drives and did everything pretty smoothly. It even offered me to reinstall the boot loader, but that ultimately (and correctly, as it turns out) failed because I didn't have a /boot/efi partition. At this point, I realized there was no easy way out of this, and I just proceeded to completely reinstall Debian. I had a spare NVMe drive lying around (backups FTW!) so I just swapped that in, rebooted in the Debian installer, and did a clean install. I wanted to switch to bookworm anyways, so I guess that's done too.

Storage limitations Another thing that happened during setup is that I tried to copy over the internal 2.5" SSD drive from the Purism to the Framework 1TB expansion card. There's no 2.5" slot in the new laptop, so that's pretty much the only option for storage expansion. I was tired and did something wrong. I ended up wiping the partition table on the original 2.5" drive. Oops. It might be recoverable, but just restoring the partition table didn't work either, so I'm not sure how I recover the data there. Normally, everything on my laptops and workstations is designed to be disposable, so that wasn't that big of a problem. I did manage to recover most of the data thanks to git-annex reinit, but that was a little hairy.

Bootstrapping Puppet Once I had some networking, I had to install all the packages I needed. The time I spent setting up my workstations with Puppet has finally paid off. What I actually did was to restore two critical directories:

/etc/ssh
/var/lib/puppet

So that I would keep the previous machine's identity. That way I could contact the Puppet server and install whatever was missing. I used my Puppet optimization trick to do a batch install and then I had a good base setup, although not exactly as it was before. 1700 packages were installed manually on angela before the reinstall, and not in Puppet. I did not inspect each one individually, but I did go through /etc and copied over more SSH keys, for backups and SMTP over SSH.

LVFS support It looks like there's support for the (de-facto) standard LVFS firmware update system. At least I was able to update the UEFI firmware with a simple:

apt install fwupd-amd64-signed
fwupdmgr refresh
fwupdmgr get-updates
fwupdmgr update

Nice. The 12th gen BIOS updates, currently (January 2023) beta, can be deployed through LVFS with:

fwupdmgr enable-remote lvfs-testing
echo 'DisableCapsuleUpdateOnDisk=true' >> /etc/fwupd/uefi_capsule.conf 
fwupdmgr update

Those instructions come from the beta forum post. I performed the BIOS update on 2023-01-16T16:00-0500.

Resolution tweaks The Framework laptop resolution (2256px X 1504px) is big enough to give you a pretty small font size, so welcome to the marvelous world of "scaling". The Debian wiki page has a few tricks for this.

Console This will make the console and grub fonts more readable:

cat >> /etc/default/console-setup <<EOF
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE=32x16
EOF
echo GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768 >> /etc/default/grub
update-grub

Xorg Adding this to your .Xresources will make everything look much bigger:

! 1.5*96
Xft.dpi: 144

Apparently, some of this can also help:

! These might also be useful depending on your monitor and personal preference:
Xft.autohint: 0
Xft.lcdfilter:  lcddefault
Xft.hintstyle:  hintfull
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.antialias: 1
Xft.rgba: rgb

It my experience it also makes things look a little fuzzier, which is frustrating because you have this awesome monitor but everything looks out of focus. Just bumping Xft.dpi by a 1.5 factor looks good to me. The Debian Wiki has a page on HiDPI, but it's not as good as the Arch Wiki, where the above blurb comes from. I am not using the latter because I suspect it's causing some of the "fuzziness". TODO: find the equivalent of this GNOME hack in i3? (gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"), taken from this Framework guide

Issues

BIOS configuration The Framework BIOS has some minor issues. One issue I personally encountered is that I had disabled Quick boot and Quiet boot in the BIOS to diagnose the above boot issues. This, in turn, triggers a bug where the BIOS boot manager (F12) would just hang completely. It would also fail to boot from an external USB drive. The current fix (as of BIOS 3.03) is to re-enable both Quick boot and Quiet boot. Presumably this is something that will get fixed in a future BIOS update. Note that the following keybindings are active in the BIOS POST check:

Key	Meaning
F2	Enter BIOS setup menu
F12	Enter BIOS boot manager
Delete	Enter BIOS setup menu

WiFi compatibility issues I couldn't make WiFi work at first. Obviously, the default Debian installer doesn't ship with proprietary firmware (although that might change soon) so the WiFi card didn't work out of the box. But even after copying the firmware through a USB stick, I couldn't quite manage to find the right combination of ip/iw/wpa-supplicant (yes, after repeatedly copying a bunch more packages over to get those bootstrapped). (Next time I should probably try something like this post.) Thankfully, I had a little USB-C dongle with a RJ-45 jack lying around. That also required a firmware blob, but it was a single package to copy over, and with that loaded, I had network. Eventually, I did managed to make WiFi work; the problem was more on the side of "I forgot how to configure a WPA network by hand from the commandline" than anything else. NetworkManager worked fine and got WiFi working correctly. Note that this is with Debian bookworm, which has the 5.19 Linux kernel, and with the firmware-nonfree (firmware-iwlwifi, specifically) package.

Battery life I was having between about 7 hours of battery on the Purism Librem 13v4, and that's after a year or two of battery life. Now, I still have about 7 hours of battery life, which is nicer than my old ThinkPad X220 (20 minutes!) but really, it's not that good for a new generation laptop. The 12th generation Intel chipset probably improved things compared to the previous one Framework laptop, but I don't have a 11th gen Framework to compare with). (Note that those are estimates from my status bar, not wall clock measurements. They should still be comparable between the Purism and Framework, that said.) The battery life doesn't seem up to, say, Dell XPS 13, ThinkPad X1, and of course not the Apple M1, where I would expect 10+ hours of battery life out of the box. That said, I do get those kind estimates when the machine is fully charged and idle. In fact, when everything is quiet and nothing is plugged in, I get dozens of hours of battery life estimated (I've seen 25h!). So power usage fluctuates quite a bit depending on usage, which I guess is expected. Concretely, so far, light web browsing, reading emails and writing notes in Emacs (e.g. this file) takes about 8W of power:

Time    User  Nice   Sys  Idle    IO  Run Ctxt/s  IRQ/s Fork Exec Exit  Watts
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
 Average   1.7   0.0   0.5  97.6   0.2  1.2 4684.9 1985.2 126.6 39.1 128.0   7.57
 GeoMean   1.4   0.0   0.4  97.6   0.1  1.2 4416.6 1734.5 111.6 27.9 113.3   7.54
  StdDev   1.0   0.2   0.2   1.2   0.0  0.5 1584.7 1058.3 82.1 44.0 80.2   0.71
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
 Minimum   0.2   0.0   0.2  94.9   0.1  1.0 2242.0  698.2 82.0 17.0 82.0   6.36
 Maximum   4.1   1.1   1.0  99.4   0.2  3.0 8687.4 4445.1 463.0 249.0 449.0   9.10
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Summary:
System:   7.57 Watts on average with standard deviation 0.71

Expansion cards matter a lot in the battery life (see below for a thorough discussion), my normal setup is 2xUSB-C and 1xUSB-A (yes, with an empty slot, and yes, to save power). Interestingly, playing a video in a (720p) window in a window takes up more power (10.5W) than in full screen (9.5W) but I blame that on my desktop setup (i3 + compton)... Not sure if mpv hits the VA-API, maybe not in windowed mode. Similar results with 1080p, interestingly, except the window struggles to keep up altogether. Full screen playback takes a relatively comfortable 9.5W, which means a solid 5h+ of playback, which is fine by me. Fooling around the web, small edits, youtube-dl, and I'm at around 80% battery after about an hour, with an estimated 5h left, which is a little disappointing. I had a 7h remaining estimate before I started goofing around Discourse, so I suspect the website is a pretty big battery drain, actually. I see about 10-12 W, while I was probably at half that (6-8W) just playing music with mpv in the background... In other words, it looks like editing posts in Discourse with Firefox takes a solid 4-6W of power. Amazing and gross. (When writing about abusive power usage generates more power usage, is that an heisenbug? Or schr dinbug?)

Power management Compared to the Purism Librem 13v4, the ongoing power usage seems to be slightly better. An anecdotal metric is that the Purism would take 800mA idle, while the more powerful Framework manages a little over 500mA as I'm typing this, fluctuating between 450 and 600mA. That is without any active expansion card, except the storage. Those numbers come from the output of tlp-stat -b and, unfortunately, the "ampere" unit makes it quite hard to compare those, because voltage is not necessarily the same between the two platforms.

• TODO: review Arch Linux's tips on power saving
• TODO: i915 driver has a lot of parameters, including some about power saving, see, again, the arch wiki, and particularly enable_fbc=1

TL:DR; power management on the laptop is an issue, but there's various tweaks you can make to improve it. Try:

• powertop --auto-tune
• apt install tlp && systemctl enable tlp
• nvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep on the kernel command line may help with standby power usage
• keep only USB-C expansion cards plugged in, all others suck power even when idle
• consider upgrading the BIOS to latest beta (3.06 at the time of writing), unverified power savings
• latest Linux kernels (6.2) promise power savings as well (unverified)

Update: also try to follow the official optimization guide. It was made for Ubuntu but will probably also work for your distribution of choice with a few tweaks. They recommend using tlpui but it's not packaged in Debian. There is, however, a Flatpak release. In my case, it resulted in the following diff to tlp.conf: tlp.patch.

Background on CPU architecture There were power problems in the 11th gen Framework laptop, according to this report from Linux After Dark, so the issues with power management on the Framework are not new. The 12th generation Intel CPU (AKA "Alder Lake") is a big-little architecture with "power-saving" and "performance" cores. There used to be performance problems introduced by the scheduler in Linux 5.16 but those were eventually fixed in 5.18, which uses Intel's hardware as an "intelligent, low-latency hardware-assisted scheduler". According to Phoronix, the 5.19 release improved the power saving, at the cost of some penalty cost. There were also patch series to make the scheduler configurable, but it doesn't look those have been merged as of 5.19. There was also a session about this at the 2022 Linux Plumbers, but they stopped short of talking more about the specific problems Linux is facing in Alder lake:

Specifically, the kernel's energy-aware scheduling heuristics don't work well on those CPUs. A number of features present there complicate the energy picture; these include SMT, Intel's "turbo boost" mode, and the CPU's internal power-management mechanisms. For many workloads, running on an ostensibly more power-hungry Pcore can be more efficient than using an Ecore. Time for discussion of the problem was lacking, though, and the session came to a close.

All this to say that the 12gen Intel line shipped with this Framework series should have better power management thanks to its power-saving cores. And Linux has had the scheduler changes to make use of this (but maybe is still having trouble). In any case, this might not be the source of power management problems on my laptop, quite the opposite. Also note that the firmware updates for various chipsets are supposed to improve things eventually. On the other hand, The Verge simply declared the whole P-series a mistake...

Attempts at improving power usage I did try to follow some of the tips in this forum post. The tricks powertop --auto-tune and tlp's PCIE_ASPM_ON_BAT=powersupersave basically did nothing: I was stuck at 10W power usage in powertop (600+mA in tlp-stat). Apparently, I should be able to reach the C8 CPU power state (or even C9, C10) in powertop, but I seem to be stock at C7. (Although I'm not sure how to read that tab in powertop: in the Core(HW) column there's only C3/C6/C7 states, and most cores are 85% in C7 or maybe C6. But the next column over does show many CPUs in C10 states... As it turns out, the graphics card actually takes up a good chunk of power unless proper power management is enabled (see below). After tweaking this, I did manage to get down to around 7W power usage in powertop. Expansion cards actually do take up power, and so does the screen, obviously. The fully-lit screen takes a solid 2-3W of power compared to the fully dimmed screen. When removing all expansion cards and making the laptop idle, I can spin it down to 4 watts power usage at the moment, and an amazing 2 watts when the screen turned off.

Caveats Abusive (10W+) power usage that I initially found could be a problem with my desktop configuration: I have this silly status bar that updates every second and probably causes redraws... The CPU certainly doesn't seem to spin down below 1GHz. Also note that this is with an actual desktop running with everything: it could very well be that some things (I'm looking at you Signal Desktop) take up unreasonable amount of power on their own (hello, 1W/electron, sheesh). Syncthing and containerd (Docker!) also seem to take a good 500mW just sitting there. Beyond my desktop configuration, this could, of course, be a Debian-specific problem; your favorite distribution might be better at power management.

Idle power usage tests Some expansion cards waste energy, even when unused. Here is a summary of the findings from the powerstat page. I also include other devices tested in this page for completeness:

Device	Minimum	Average	Max	Stdev	Note
Screen, 100%	2.4W	2.6W	2.8W	N/A
Screen, 1%	30mW	140mW	250mW	N/A
Backlight 1	290mW	?	?	?	fairly small, all things considered
Backlight 2	890mW	1.2W	3W?	460mW?	geometric progression
Backlight 3	1.69W	1.5W	1.8W?	390mW?	significant power use
Radios	100mW	250mW	N/A	N/A
USB-C	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	negligible power drain
USB-A	10mW	10mW	?	10mW	almost negligible
DisplayPort	300mW	390mW	600mW	N/A	not passive
HDMI	380mW	440mW	1W?	20mW	not passive
1TB SSD	1.65W	1.79W	2W	12mW	significant, probably higher when busy
MicroSD	1.6W	3W	6W	1.93W	highest power usage, possibly even higher when busy
Ethernet	1.69W	1.64W	1.76W	N/A	comparable to the SSD card

So it looks like all expansion cards but the USB-C ones are active, i.e. they draw power with idle. The USB-A cards are the least concern, sucking out 10mW, pretty much within the margin of error. But both the DisplayPort and HDMI do take a few hundred miliwatts. It looks like USB-A connectors have this fundamental flaw that they necessarily draw some powers because they lack the power negotiation features of USB-C. At least according to this post:

It seems the USB A must have power going to it all the time, that the old USB 2 and 3 protocols, the USB C only provides power when there is a connection. Old versus new.

Apparently, this is a problem specific to the USB-C to USB-A adapter that ships with the Framework. Some people have actually changed their orders to all USB-C because of this problem, but I'm not sure the problem is as serious as claimed in the forums. I couldn't reproduce the "one watt" power drains suggested elsewhere, at least not repeatedly. (A previous version of this post did show such a power drain, but it was in a less controlled test environment than the series of more rigorous tests above.) The worst offenders are the storage cards: the SSD drive takes at least one watt of power and the MicroSD card seems to want to take all the way up to 6 watts of power, both just sitting there doing nothing. This confirms claims of 1.4W for the SSD (but not 5W) power usage found elsewhere. The former post has instructions on how to disable the card in software. The MicroSD card has been reported as using 2 watts, but I've seen it as high as 6 watts, which is pretty damning. The Framework team has a beta update for the DisplayPort adapter but currently only for Windows (LVFS technically possible, "under investigation"). A USB-A firmware update is also under investigation. It is therefore likely at least some of those power management issues will eventually be fixed. Note that the upcoming Ethernet card has a reported 2-8W power usage, depending on traffic. I did my own power usage tests in powerstat-wayland and they seem lower than 2W. The upcoming 6.2 Linux kernel might also improve battery usage when idle, see this Phoronix article for details, likely in early 2023.

Idle power usage tests under Wayland Update: I redid those tests under Wayland, see powerstat-wayland for details. The TL;DR: is that power consumption is either smaller or similar.

Idle power usage tests, 3.06 beta BIOS I redid the idle tests after the 3.06 beta BIOS update and ended up with this results:

Device	Minimum	Average	Max	Stdev	Note
Baseline	1.96W	2.01W	2.11W	30mW	1 USB-C, screen off, backlight off, no radios
2 USB-C	1.95W	2.16W	3.69W	430mW	USB-C confirmed as mostly passive...
3 USB-C	1.95W	2.16W	3.69W	430mW	... although with extra stdev
1TB SSD	3.72W	3.85W	4.62W	200mW	unchanged from before upgrade
1 USB-A	1.97W	2.18W	4.02W	530mW	unchanged
2 USB-A	1.97W	2.00W	2.08W	30mW	unchanged
3 USB-A	1.94W	1.99W	2.03W	20mW	unchanged
MicroSD w/o card	3.54W	3.58W	3.71W	40mW	significant improvement! 2-3W power saving!
MicroSD w/ card	3.53W	3.72W	5.23W	370mW	new measurement! increased deviation
DisplayPort	2.28W	2.31W	2.37W	20mW	unchanged
1 HDMI	2.43W	2.69W	4.53W	460mW	unchanged
2 HDMI	2.53W	2.59W	2.67W	30mW	unchanged
External USB	3.85W	3.89W	3.94W	30mW	new result
Ethernet	3.60W	3.70W	4.91W	230mW	unchanged

Note that the table summary is different than the previous table: here we show the absolute numbers while the previous table was doing a confusing attempt at showing relative (to the baseline) numbers. Conclusion: the 3.06 BIOS update did not significantly change idle power usage stats except for the MicroSD card which has significantly improved. The new "external USB" test is also interesting: it shows how the provided 1TB SSD card performs (admirably) compared to existing devices. The other new result is the MicroSD card with a card which, interestingly, uses less power than the 1TB SSD drive.

Standby battery usage I wrote some quick hack to evaluate how much power is used during sleep. Apparently, this is one of the areas that should have improved since the first Framework model, let's find out. My baseline for comparison is the Purism laptop, which, in 10 minutes, went from this:

sep 28 11:19:45 angela systemd-sleep[209379]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT/charge_now                      =   6045 [mAh]

... to this:

sep 28 11:29:47 angela systemd-sleep[209725]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT/charge_now                      =   6037 [mAh]

That's 8mAh per 10 minutes (and 2 seconds), or 48mA, or, with this battery, about 127 hours or roughly 5 days of standby. Not bad! In comparison, here is my really old x220, before:

sep 29 22:13:54 emma systemd-sleep[176315]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now                     =   5070 [mWh]

... after:

sep 29 22:23:54 emma systemd-sleep[176486]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now                     =   4980 [mWh]

... which is 90 mwH in 10 minutes, or a whopping 540mA, which was possibly okay when this battery was new (62000 mAh, so about 100 hours, or about 5 days), but this battery is almost dead and has only 5210 mAh when full, so only 10 hours standby. And here is the Framework performing a similar test, before:

sep 29 22:27:04 angela systemd-sleep[4515]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full                    =   3518 [mAh]
sep 29 22:27:04 angela systemd-sleep[4515]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   2861 [mAh]

... after:

sep 29 22:37:08 angela systemd-sleep[4743]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   2812 [mAh]

... which is 49mAh in a little over 10 minutes (and 4 seconds), or 292mA, much more than the Purism, but half of the X220. At this rate, the battery would last on standby only 12 hours!! That is pretty bad. Note that this was done with the following expansion cards:

• 2 USB-C
• 1 1TB SSD drive
• 1 USB-A with a hub connected to it, with keyboard and LAN

Preliminary tests without the hub (over one minute) show that it doesn't significantly affect this power consumption (300mA). This guide also suggests booting with nvme.noacpi=1 but this still gives me about 5mAh/min (or 300mA). Adding mem_sleep_default=deep to the kernel command line does make a difference. Before:

sep 29 23:03:11 angela systemd-sleep[3699]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   2544 [mAh]

... after:

sep 29 23:04:25 angela systemd-sleep[4039]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   2542 [mAh]

... which is 2mAh in 74 seconds, which is 97mA, brings us to a more reasonable 36 hours, or a day and a half. It's still above the x220 power usage, and more than an order of magnitude more than the Purism laptop. It's also far from the 0.4% promised by upstream, which would be 14mA for the 3500mAh battery. It should also be noted that this "deep" sleep mode is a little more disruptive than regular sleep. As you can see by the timing, it took more than 10 seconds for the laptop to resume, which feels a little alarming as your banging the keyboard to bring it back to life. You can confirm the current sleep mode with:

# cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
s2idle [deep]

In the above, deep is selected. You can change it on the fly with:

printf s2idle > /sys/power/mem_sleep

Here's another test:

sep 30 22:25:50 angela systemd-sleep[32207]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   1619 [mAh]
sep 30 22:31:30 angela systemd-sleep[32516]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   1613 [mAh]

... better! 6 mAh in about 6 minutes, works out to 63.5mA, so more than two days standby. A longer test:

oct 01 09:22:56 angela systemd-sleep[62978]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   3327 [mAh]
oct 01 12:47:35 angela systemd-sleep[63219]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   3147 [mAh]

That's 180mAh in about 3.5h, 52mA! Now at 66h, or almost 3 days. I wasn't sure why I was seeing such fluctuations in those tests, but as it turns out, expansion card power tests show that they do significantly affect power usage, especially the SSD drive, which can take up to two full watts of power even when idle. I didn't control for expansion cards in the above tests running them with whatever card I had plugged in without paying attention so it's likely the cause of the high power usage and fluctuations. It might be possible to work around this problem by disabling USB devices before suspend. TODO. See also this post. In the meantime, I have been able to get much better suspend performance by unplugging all modules. Then I get this result:

oct 04 11:15:38 angela systemd-sleep[257571]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   3203 [mAh]
oct 04 15:09:32 angela systemd-sleep[257866]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   3145 [mAh]

Which is 14.8mA! Almost exactly the number promised by Framework! With a full battery, that means a 10 days suspend time. This is actually pretty good, and far beyond what I was expecting when starting down this journey. So, once the expansion cards are unplugged, suspend power usage is actually quite reasonable. More detailed standby tests are available in the standby-tests page, with a summary below. There is also some hope that the Chromebook edition specifically designed with a specification of 14 days standby time could bring some firmware improvements back down to the normal line. Some of those issues were reported upstream in April 2022, but there doesn't seem to have been any progress there since. TODO: one final solution here is suspend-then-hibernate, which Windows uses for this TODO: consider implementing the S0ix sleep states , see also troubleshooting TODO: consider https://github.com/intel/pm-graph

Standby expansion cards test results This table is a summary of the more extensive standby-tests I have performed:

Device	Wattage	Amperage	Days	Note
baseline	0.25W	16mA	9	sleep=deep nvme.noacpi=1
s2idle	0.29W	18.9mA	~7	sleep=s2idle nvme.noacpi=1
normal nvme	0.31W	20mA	~7	sleep=s2idle without nvme.noacpi=1
1 USB-C	0.23W	15mA	~10
2 USB-C	0.23W	14.9mA		same as above
1 USB-A	0.75W	48.7mA	3	+500mW (!!) for the first USB-A card!
2 USB-A	1.11W	72mA	2	+360mW
3 USB-A	1.48W	96mA	<2	+370mW
1TB SSD	0.49W	32mA	<5	+260mW
MicroSD	0.52W	34mA	~4	+290mW
DisplayPort	0.85W	55mA	<3	+620mW (!!)
1 HDMI	0.58W	38mA	~4	+250mW
2 HDMI	0.65W	42mA	<4	+70mW

Conclusions:

• USB-C cards take no extra power on suspend, possibly less than empty slots, more testing required
• USB-A cards take a lot more power on suspend (300-500mW) than on regular idle (~10mW, almost negligible)
• 1TB SSD and MicroSD cards seem to take a reasonable amount of power (260-290mW), compared to their runtime equivalents (1-6W!)
• DisplayPort takes a surprising lot of power (620mW), almost double its average runtime usage (390mW)
• HDMI cards take, surprisingly, less power (250mW) in standby than the DP card (620mW)
• and oddly, a second card adds less power usage (70mW?!) than the first, maybe a circuit is used by both?

A discussion of those results is in this forum post.

Standby expansion cards test results, 3.06 beta BIOS Framework recently (2022-11-07) announced that they will publish a firmware upgrade to address some of the USB-C issues, including power management. This could positively affect the above result, improving both standby and runtime power usage. The update came out in December 2022 and I redid my analysis with the following results:

Device	Wattage	Amperage	Days	Note
baseline	0.25W	16mA	9	no cards, same as before upgrade
1 USB-C	0.25W	16mA	9	same as before
2 USB-C	0.25W	16mA	9	same
1 USB-A	0.80W	62mA	3	+550mW!! worse than before
2 USB-A	1.12W	73mA	<2	+320mW, on top of the above, bad!
Ethernet	0.62W	40mA	3-4	new result, decent
1TB SSD	0.52W	34mA	4	a bit worse than before (+2mA)
MicroSD	0.51W	22mA	4	same
DisplayPort	0.52W	34mA	4+	upgrade improved by 300mW
1 HDMI	?	38mA	?	same
2 HDMI	?	45mA	?	a bit worse than before (+3mA)
Normal	1.08W	70mA	~2	Ethernet, 2 USB-C, USB-A

Full results in standby-tests-306. The big takeaway for me is that the update did not improve power usage on the USB-A ports which is a big problem for my use case. There is a notable improvement on the DisplayPort power consumption which brings it more in line with the HDMI connector, but it still doesn't properly turn off on suspend either. Even worse, the USB-A ports now sometimes fails to resume after suspend, which is pretty annoying. This is a known problem that will hopefully get fixed in the final release.

Battery wear protection The BIOS has an option to limit charge to 80% to mitigate battery wear. There's a way to control the embedded controller from runtime with fw-ectool, partly documented here. The command would be:

sudo ectool fwchargelimit 80

I looked at building this myself but failed to run it. I opened a RFP in Debian so that we can ship this in Debian, and also documented my work there. Note that there is now a counter that tracks charge/discharge cycles. It's visible in tlp-stat -b, which is a nice improvement:

root@angela:/home/anarcat# tlp-stat -b
--- TLP 1.5.0 --------------------------------------------
+++ Battery Care
Plugin: generic
Supported features: none available
+++ Battery Status: BAT1
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/manufacturer                   = NVT
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/model_name                     = Framewo
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/cycle_count                    =      3
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full_design             =   3572 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_full                    =   3541 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now                     =   1625 [mAh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/current_now                    =    178 [mA]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/status                         = Discharging
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_start_threshold = (not available)
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_end_threshold   = (not available)
Charge                                                      =   45.9 [%]
Capacity                                                    =   99.1 [%]

One thing that is still missing is the charge threshold data (the (not available) above). There's been some work to make that accessible in August, stay tuned? This would also make it possible implement hysteresis support.

Ethernet expansion card The Framework ethernet expansion card is a fancy little doodle: "2.5Gbit/s and 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet", the "clear housing lets you peek at the RTL8156 controller that powers it". Which is another way to say "we didn't completely finish prod on this one, so it kind of looks like we 3D-printed this in the shop".... The card is a little bulky, but I guess that's inevitable considering the RJ-45 form factor when compared to the thin Framework laptop. I have had a serious issue when trying it at first: the link LEDs just wouldn't come up. I made a full bug report in the forum and with upstream support, but eventually figured it out on my own. It's (of course) a power saving issue: if you reboot the machine, the links come up when the laptop is running the BIOS POST check and even when the Linux kernel boots. I first thought that the problem is likely related to the powertop service which I run at boot time to tweak some power saving settings. It seems like this:

echo 'on' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/4-2/power/control'

... is a good workaround to bring the card back online. You can even return to power saving mode and the card will still work:

echo 'auto' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/4-2/power/control'

Further research by Matt_Hartley from the Framework Team found this issue in the tlp tracker that shows how the USB_AUTOSUSPEND setting enables the power saving even if the driver doesn't support it, which, in retrospect, just sounds like a bad idea. To quote that issue:

By default, USB power saving is active in the kernel, but not force-enabled for incompatible drivers. That is, devices that support suspension will suspend, drivers that do not, will not.

So the fix is actually to uninstall tlp or disable that setting by adding this to /etc/tlp.conf:

USB_AUTOSUSPEND=0

... but that disables auto-suspend on all USB devices, which may hurt other power usage performance. I have found that a a combination of:

USB_AUTOSUSPEND=1
USB_DENYLIST="0bda:8156"

and this on the kernel commandline:

usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k

... actually does work correctly. I now have this in my /etc/default/grub.d/framework-tweaks.cfg file:

# net.ifnames=0: normal interface names ffs (e.g. eth0, wlan0, not wlp166
s0)
# nvme.noacpi=1: reduce SSD disk power usage (not working)
# mem_sleep_default=deep: reduce power usage during sleep (not working)
# usbcore.quirk is a workaround for the ethernet card suspend bug: https:
//guides.frame.work/Guide/Fedora+37+Installation+on+the+Framework+Laptop/
108?lang=en
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="net.ifnames=0 nvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k"
# fix the resolution in grub for fonts to not be tiny
GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768

Other than that, I haven't been able to max out the card because I don't have other 2.5Gbit/s equipment at home, which is strangely satisfying. But running against my Turris Omnia router, I could pretty much max a gigabit fairly easily:

[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bitrate         Retr
[  5]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.09 GBytes   937 Mbits/sec  238             sender
[  5]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.09 GBytes   934 Mbits/sec                  receiver

The card doesn't require any proprietary firmware blobs which is surprising. Other than the power saving issues, it just works. In my power tests (see powerstat-wayland), the Ethernet card seems to use about 1.6W of power idle, without link, in the above "quirky" configuration where the card is functional but without autosuspend.

Proprietary firmware blobs The framework does need proprietary firmware to operate. Specifically:

• the WiFi network card shipped with the DIY kit is a AX210 card that requires a 5.19 kernel or later, and the firmware-iwlwifi non-free firmware package
• the Bluetooth adapter also loads the firmware-iwlwifi package (untested)
• the graphics work out of the box without firmware, but certain power management features come only with special proprietary firmware, normally shipped in the firmware-misc-nonfree but currently missing from the package

Note that, at the time of writing, the latest i915 firmware from linux-firmware has a serious bug where loading all the accessible firmware results in noticeable I estimate 200-500ms lag between the keyboard (not the mouse!) and the display. Symptoms also include tearing and shearing of windows, it's pretty nasty. One workaround is to delete the two affected firmware files:

cd /lib/firmware && rm adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin
update-initramfs -u

You will get the following warning during build, which is good as it means the problematic firmware is disabled:

W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin for module i915

But then it also means that critical firmware isn't loaded, which means, among other things, a higher battery drain. I was able to move from 8.5-10W down to the 7W range after making the firmware work properly. This is also after turning the backlight all the way down, as that takes a solid 2-3W in full blast. The proper fix is to use some compositing manager. I ended up using compton with the following systemd unit:

[Unit]
Description=start compositing manager
PartOf=graphical-session.target
ConditionHost=angela
[Service]
Type=exec
ExecStart=compton --show-all-xerrors --backend glx --vsync opengl-swc
Restart=on-failure
[Install]
RequiredBy=graphical-session.target

compton is orphaned however, so you might be tempted to use picom instead, but in my experience the latter uses much more power (1-2W extra, similar experience). I also tried compiz but it would just crash with:

anarcat@angela:~$ compiz --replace
compiz (core) - Warn: No XI2 extension
compiz (core) - Error: Another composite manager is already running on screen: 0
compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0

When running from the base session, I would get this instead:

compiz (core) - Warn: No XI2 extension
compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'ccp'
compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'ccp'

Thanks to EmanueleRocca for figuring all that out. See also this discussion about power management on the Framework forum. Note that Wayland environments do not require any special configuration here and actually work better, see my Wayland migration notes for details.

Also note that the iwlwifi firmware also looks incomplete. Even with the package installed, I get those errors in dmesg:

[   19.534429] Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux
[   19.534691] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
[   19.541867] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode (-2)
[   19.541881] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode (-2)
[   19.541882] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541890] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode (-2)
[   19.541895] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode (-2)
[   19.541896] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541903] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode (-2)
[   19.541907] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode (-2)
[   19.541908] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541913] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode (-2)
[   19.541916] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode (-2)
[   19.541917] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541922] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode (-2)
[   19.541926] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode (-2)
[   19.541927] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.541933] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode (-2)
[   19.541937] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode (-2)
[   19.541937] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode failed with error -2
[   19.544244] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-66.ucode
[   19.544257] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: api flags index 2 larger than supported by driver
[   19.544270] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: TLV_FW_FSEQ_VERSION: FSEQ Version: 0.63.2.1
[   19.544523] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwl-debug-yoyo.bin (-2)
[   19.544528] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwl-debug-yoyo.bin (-2)
[   19.544530] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: loaded firmware version 66.55c64978.0 ty-a0-gf-a0-66.ucode op_mode iwlmvm

Some of those are available in the latest upstream firmware package (iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode, -68, and -67), but not all (e.g. iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode is missing) . It's unclear what those do or don't, as the WiFi seems to work well without them. I still copied them in from the latest linux-firmware package in the hope they would help with power management, but I did not notice a change after loading them. There are also multiple knobs on the iwlwifi and iwlmvm drivers. The latter has a power_schmeme setting which defaults to 2 (balanced), setting it to 3 (low power) could improve battery usage as well, in theory. The iwlwifi driver also has power_save (defaults to disabled) and power_level (1-5, defaults to 1) settings. See also the output of modinfo iwlwifi and modinfo iwlmvm for other driver options.

Graphics acceleration After loading the latest upstream firmware and setting up a compositing manager (compton, above), I tested the classic glxgears. Running in a window gives me odd results, as the gears basically grind to a halt:

Running synchronized to the vertical refresh.  The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
137 frames in 5.1 seconds = 26.984 FPS
27 frames in 5.4 seconds =  5.022 FPS

Ouch. 5FPS! But interestingly, once the window is in full screen, it does hit the monitor refresh rate:

300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.000 FPS

I'm not really a gamer and I'm not normally using any of that fancy graphics acceleration stuff (except maybe my browser does?). I installed intel-gpu-tools for the intel_gpu_top command to confirm the GPU was engaged when doing those simulations. A nice find. Other useful diagnostic tools include glxgears and glxinfo (in mesa-utils) and (vainfo in vainfo). Following to this post, I also made sure to have those settings in my about:config in Firefox, or, in user.js:

user_pref("media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled", true);

Note that the guide suggests many other settings to tweak, but those might actually be overkill, see this comment and its parents. I did try forcing hardware acceleration by setting gfx.webrender.all to true, but everything became choppy and weird. The guide also mentions installing the intel-media-driver package, but I could not find that in Debian. The Arch wiki has, as usual, an excellent reference on hardware acceleration in Firefox.

Chromium / Signal desktop bugs It looks like both Chromium and Signal Desktop misbehave with my compositor setup (compton + i3). The fix is to add a persistent flag to Chromium. In Arch, it's conveniently in ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf but that doesn't actually work in Debian. I had to put the flag in /etc/chromium.d/disable-compositing, like this:

export CHROMIUM_FLAGS="$CHROMIUM_FLAGS --disable-gpu-compositing"

It's possible another one of the hundreds of flags might fix this issue better, but I don't really have time to go through this entire, incomplete, and unofficial list (!?!). Signal Desktop is a similar problem, and doesn't reuse those flags (because of course it doesn't). Instead I had to rewrite the wrapper script in /usr/local/bin/signal-desktop to use this instead:

exec /usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 org.signal.Signal --disable-gpu-compositing "$@"

This was mostly done in this Puppet commit. I haven't figured out the root of this problem. I did try using picom and xcompmgr; they both suffer from the same issue. Another Debian testing user on Wayland told me they haven't seen this problem, so hopefully this can be fixed by switching to wayland.

Graphics card hangs I believe I might have this bug which results in a total graphical hang for 15-30 seconds. It's fairly rare so it's not too disruptive, but when it does happen, it's pretty alarming. The comments on that bug report are encouraging though: it seems this is a bug in either mesa or the Intel graphics driver, which means many people have this problem so it's likely to be fixed. There's actually a merge request on mesa already (2022-12-29). It could also be that bug because the error message I get is actually:

Jan 20 12:49:10 angela kernel: Asynchronous wait on fence 0000:00:02.0:sway[104431]:cb0ae timed out (hint:intel_atomic_commit_ready [i915]) 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GPU HANG: ecode 12:0:00000000 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] Resetting chip for stopped heartbeat on rcs0 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC firmware i915/adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin version 70.1 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC firmware i915/tgl_huc_7.9.3.bin version 7.9 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC authenticated 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC submission enabled 
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC SLPC enabled

It's a solid 30 seconds graphical hang. Maybe the keyboard and everything else keeps working. The latter bug report is quite long, with many comments, but this one from January 2023 seems to say that Sway 1.8 fixed the problem. There's also an earlier patch to add an extra kernel parameter that supposedly fixes that too. There's all sorts of other workarounds in there, for example this:

echo "options i915 enable_dc=1 enable_guc_loading=1 enable_guc_submission=1 edp_vswing=0 enable_guc=2 enable_fbc=1 enable_psr=1 disable_power_well=0"   sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf

from this comment... So that one is unsolved, as far as the upstream drivers are concerned, but maybe could be fixed through Sway.

Weird USB hangs / graphical glitches I have had weird connectivity glitches better described in this post, but basically: my USB keyboard and mice (connected over a USB hub) drop keys, lag a lot or hang, and I get visual glitches. The fix was to tighten the screws around the CPU on the motherboard (!), which is, thankfully, a rather simple repair.

USB docks are hell Note that the monitors are hooked up to angela through a USB-C / Thunderbolt dock from Cable Matters, with the lovely name of 201053-SIL. It has issues, see this blog post for an in-depth discussion.

Shipping details I ordered the Framework in August 2022 and received it about a month later, which is sooner than expected because the August batch was late. People (including me) expected this to have an impact on the September batch, but it seems Framework have been able to fix the delivery problems and keep up with the demand. As of early 2023, their website announces that laptops ship "within 5 days". I have myself ordered a few expansion cards in November 2022, and they shipped on the same day, arriving 3-4 days later.

The supply pipeline There are basically 6 steps in the Framework shipping pipeline, each (except the last) accompanied with an email notification:

1. pre-order
2. preparing batch
3. preparing order
4. payment complete
5. shipping
6. (received)

This comes from the crowdsourced spreadsheet, which should be updated when the status changes here. I was part of the "third batch" of the 12th generation laptop, which was supposed to ship in September. It ended up arriving on my door step on September 27th, about 33 days after ordering. It seems current orders are not processed in "batches", but in real time, see this blog post for details on shipping.

Shipping trivia I don't know about the others, but my laptop shipped through no less than four different airplane flights. Here are the hops it took:

• Taoyuan, Taiwan 2022-09-23
• Anchorage, Alaska, USA (?!) 2022-09-24
• Memphis, Tennessee, USA 2022-09-25
• Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada (!! back the wrong way!) 2022-09-26
• Mirabel, Qu bec, Canada 2022-09-27
• Montr al, Qu bec, Canada

I can't quite figure out how to calculate exactly how much mileage that is, but it's huge. The ride through Alaska is surprising enough but the bounce back through Winnipeg is especially weird. I guess the route happens that way because of Fedex shipping hubs. There was a related oddity when I had my Purism laptop shipped: it left from the west coast and seemed to enter on an endless, two week long road trip across the continental US.

Other resources

• dock questions:
  • list of compatible USB-C docks but beware of the above compatibility problems on the 12th gen
  • see also this comprehensive post on USB/TB/DP/docks which has a section on the Framework specifically
  • anelki recommended the OWC docks which primarily target Macs but apparently "make really good ones"
  • someone else recommended buying "Thunderbolt" docks instead of "USB-C" as the latter don't necessarily include the former, recommending CalDigit docks
• mods:
  • desktop mod (from this discussion), also a normal desktop adapter to reuse an existing case (from this thread)
  • mainboard case (official!)
  • battery case (!), the verge has extra photos of the mainboard and battery cases
  • tablet mod (kind of clunky, but works!)
  • keyboard mod (i.e. turn the Framework keyboard, touch pad, fingerprint reader and power buttons into a "normal" USB keyboard and hub)
  • triple screen laptop mod (video)
  • Thinkpad 701C transplant
  • Braille laptop
• Debian installation report, has good tips on the firmware hacks necessary
• Excellent 12th gen review from an Arch Linux user
• cool expansion port mods:
  • empty drawer
  • dual USB-C (mockup only), expansion hub (just an idea, references other discussions), actually seriously considered by Framework, limited by existing chipsets for now
  • full-size SD card reader
  • magnetic charger
  • Yubikey 5 case and solokey case
  • screwdriver
  • Ethernet (official, back-order as of 2022-09-13, now shipping as of 2023)
  • votes seem to go towards Ethernet and full-sized SD card reader
  • 3D printed expansion card holder
  • LTE modem card (design stage)
  • check out this forum category for a cornucopia of those
• upstream resources:
  • community forum, lots of information, much support, wow!
  • knowledge base
  • repair guides
  • Linux-specific guides
  • blog (RSS)
  • chat is on Discord, but bridged with Matrix, there's talk of bridging it with IRC as well, for now there's a handful of us in #framework on https://libera.chat/
  • GitHub organization, interesting repositories include the Expansion Cards, Input Modules, Expansion Bay, mainboard, EmbeddedController

1. on raw hardware when we re using Carthage to drive a hypervisor
2. As part of image building pipelines to build AMIs for Amazon Web Services
3. Installed onto AWS instances built from the Debian AMI where we cannot use custom AMIs
4. Installed onto KVM VMs
5. As part of building the Carthage container images

1. Containerfiles mix the disadvantages of imperative and declarative formats. Like a declarative format they have no explicit control logic. It seems like that would be good for introspecting and reasoning about Containers. But all you get is the base image and a set of commands to build a container. For reasoning about common things like whether a container has a particular vulnerability or can be distributed under a particular license, that s not very useful. So we don t get much valuable introspection out of the declarative aspects, and all too often we see Containerfiles generated by Makefiles or other multi-level build-systems to get more logic or control flow.
2. Containerfiles have limited facility for doing things outside the container. The disadvantage of this is that you end up installing all the software you need to build the container into the container itself (or having a multi-level build system). But for example if I want to use Ansible to configure a container, the easiest way to do that is to actually install Ansible into the container itself, even though Ansible has a large dependency chain most of which we won t need in the container. Yes, Ansible does have a number of connection methods including one for Buildah, but by the point you re using that, you re already using a multi-level build system and aren t really just using a Containerfile.

class layout(CarthageLayout):
    add_provider(ConfigLayout)
    add_provider(carthage.ansible.ansible_log, str(_dir/"ansible.log"))

    class CarthageImage(PodmanImageModel, carthage_base.CarthageServerRole):
        base_image = injector_access('from_scratch_debian')
        oci_image_tag = 'localhost/carthage:latest'
        oci_image_command = ['/bin/systemd']

        base_image =  debian:bookworm 

        class customize_for_oci(FilesystemCustomization):

            @setup_task("Remove Software")
            async def remove_software(self):
                await self.run_command("apt", "-y", "purge",
                                       "exim4-base",
                                       )

            @setup_task("Install service")
            async def install_service(self):
               # installs and activates a systemd unit

sudo PYTHONPATH=$(pwd) python3 ./bin/carthage-runner ./oci_images build

• UPDATES(1/26) The above case is not only the way to do so. There are more alternatives to be taken into account. See https://wiki.debian.org/Hardware/Wanted#Available_hardware about details. Thanks, feedback from @pabs
• [1] https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi
• [2] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianNetDomains
• [3] https://people.debian.org/~gio/dqib/

For the past fifty years, the Allied war has been sanitised and romanticised almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant and the bloodthirsty. I have tried to balance the scales. [And] in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war [seems] inaccessible.

"It was common [ ] throughout the [Okinawa] campaign for replacements to get hit before we even knew their names. They came up confused, frightened, and hopeful, got wounded or killed, and went right back to the rear on the route by which they had come, shocked, bleeding, or stiff. They were forlorn figures coming up to the meat grinder and going right back out of it like homeless waifs, unknown and faceless to us, like unread books on a shelf."

A measure of the psychological distance of the Second [World] War from the First is the rarity, in 1914 1918, of drinking and drunkenness poems.

The Field Service Post Card [in WW1] has the honour of being the first widespread exemplary of that kind of document which uniquely characterises the modern world: the "Form". [And] as the first widely known example of dehumanised, automated communication, the post card popularised a mode of rhetoric indispensable to the conduct of later wars fought by great faceless conscripted armies.

Indicative of the German wartime conception [of victory] would be Hitler and Speer's elaborate plans for the ultimate reconstruction of Berlin, which made no provision for a library.

The Court itself, a Greek-style temple commanding the crest of Capitol Hill, loomed above them in the dim light of the storm. Set atop a broad marble plaza and thirty-six steps, the Court stands in splendid isolation appropriate to its place at the pinnacle of the national judiciary, one of the three independent and "coequal" branches of American government. Once dubbed the Ivory Tower by architecture critics, the Court has a Corinthian colonnade and massive twenty-foot-high bronze doors that guard the single most powerful judicial institution in the Western world. Lights still shone in several offices to the right of the Court's entrance, and [ ]

[The] institution is [now] broken into unyielding factions that have largely given up on a meaningful exchange of their respective views or, for that matter, a meaningful explication or defense of their own views. It is of Justices who in many important cases resort to transparently deceitful and hypocritical arguments and factual distortions as they discard judicial philosophy and consistent interpretation in favor of bottom-line results. This is a Court so badly splintered, yet so intent on lawmaking, that shifting 5-4 majorities, or even mere pluralities, rewrite whole swaths of constitutional law on the authority of a single, often idiosyncratic vote. It is also a Court where Justices yield great and excessive power to immature, ideologically driven clerks, who in turn use that power to manipulate their bosses and the institution they ostensibly serve.

In the short run, the cure for what ails the Court lies solely with the Justices. It is their duty, under the shield of life tenure, to recognize the pathologies affecting their work and to restore the vitality of American constitutionalism. Ultimately, though, the long-term health of the Court depends on our own resolve on whom [we] select to join that institution.

It is nevertheless telling that one of the few occasions to which Trump responded with any kind of restraint while he was in office was the 75th anniversary of D-Day in 2019.

Noir is a world ruled by bad decisions but also by bad timing. Chance, which plays such a pivotal role in war, bleeds into this world, too.

is inarguably one of the more palatable outcomes of our invasion, and the protection of women's rights has been invoked on the right and the left as an argument for staying the course in Afghanistan. How easily consequence is becoming justification. How flattering it will be one day to reimagine it as original objective.

encouraged me to think of myself as whole and unhyphenated. [ ] Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity at large. It suggested the possibility of living in and with more than one idea: Africa and Europe, or, by extension, the Global South and the West, without being mixed-this, half-that or black-other. That being black in Europe didn t necessarily mean being an immigrant.

By sheer chance, I actually visited this exact garden immediately to the publication of this book

apt install \
    brightnessctl \
    foot \
    gammastep \
    gdm3 \
    grim slurp \
    pipewire-pulse \
    sway \
    swayidle \
    swaylock \
    wdisplays \
    wev \
    wireplumber \
    wlr-randr \
    xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

Why switch? I originally held back from migrating to Wayland: it seemed like a complicated endeavor hardly worth the cost. It also didn't seem actually ready. But after reading this blurb on LWN, I decided to at least document the situation here. The actual quote that convinced me it might be worth it was:

It s amazing. I have never experienced gaming on Linux that looked this smooth in my life.

... I'm not a gamer, but I do care about latency. The longer version is worth a read as well. The point here is not to bash one side or the other, or even do a thorough comparison. I start with the premise that Xorg is likely going away in the future and that I will need to adapt some day. In fact, the last major Xorg release (21.1, October 2021) is rumored to be the last ("just like the previous release...", that said, minor releases are still coming out, e.g. 21.1.4). Indeed, it seems even core Xorg people have moved on to developing Wayland, or at least Xwayland, which was spun off it its own source tree. X, or at least Xorg, in in maintenance mode and has been for years. Granted, the X Window System is getting close to forty years old at this point: it got us amazingly far for something that was designed around the time the first graphical interface. Since Mac and (especially?) Windows released theirs, they have rebuilt their graphical backends numerous times, but UNIX derivatives have stuck on Xorg this entire time, which is a testament to the design and reliability of X. (Or our incapacity at developing meaningful architectural change across the entire ecosystem, take your pick I guess.) What pushed me over the edge is that I had some pretty bad driver crashes with Xorg while screen sharing under Firefox, in Debian bookworm (around November 2022). The symptom would be that the UI would completely crash, reverting to a text-only console, while Firefox would keep running, audio and everything still working. People could still see my screen, but I couldn't, of course, let alone interact with it. All processes still running, including Xorg. (And no, sorry, I haven't reported that bug, maybe I should have, and it's actually possible it comes up again in Wayland, of course. But at first, screen sharing didn't work of course, so it's coming a much further way. After making screen sharing work, though, the bug didn't occur again, so I consider this a Xorg-specific problem until further notice.) There were also frustrating glitches in the UI, in general. I actually had to setup a compositor alongside i3 to make things bearable at all. Video playback in a window was laggy, sluggish, and out of sync. Wayland fixed all of this.

Wayland equivalents This section documents each tool I have picked as an alternative to the current Xorg tool I am using for the task at hand. It also touches on other alternatives and how the tool was configured. Note that this list is based on the series of tools I use in desktop. TODO: update desktop with the following when done, possibly moving old configs to a ?xorg archive.

Window manager: i3 sway This seems like kind of a no-brainer. Sway is around, it's feature-complete, and it's in Debian. I'm a bit worried about the "Drew DeVault community", to be honest. There's a certain aggressiveness in the community I don't like so much; at least an open hostility towards more modern UNIX tools like containers and systemd that make it hard to do my work while interacting with that community. I'm also concern about the lack of unit tests and user manual for Sway. The i3 window manager has been designed by a fellow (ex-)Debian developer I have a lot of respect for (Michael Stapelberg), partly because of i3 itself, but also working with him on other projects. Beyond the characters, i3 has a user guide, a code of conduct, and lots more documentation. It has a test suite. Sway has... manual pages, with the homepage just telling users to use man -k sway to find what they need. I don't think we need that kind of elitism in our communities, to put this bluntly. But let's put that aside: Sway is still a no-brainer. It's the easiest thing to migrate to, because it's mostly compatible with i3. I had to immediately fix those resources to get a minimal session going:

i3	Sway	note
set_from_resources	set	no support for X resources, naturally
new_window pixel 1	default_border pixel 1	actually supported in i3 as well

That's it. All of the other changes I had to do (and there were actually a lot) were all Wayland-specific changes, not Sway-specific changes. For example, use brightnessctl instead of xbacklight to change the backlight levels. See a copy of my full sway/config for details. Other options include:

• dwl: tiling, minimalist, dwm for Wayland, not in Debian
• Hyprland: tiling, fancy animations, not in Debian
• Qtile: tiling, extensible, in Python, not in Debian (1015267)
• river: Zig, stackable, tagging, not in Debian (1006593)
• velox: inspired by xmonad and dwm, not in Debian
• vivarium: inspired by xmonad, not in Debian

Status bar: py3status waybar I have invested quite a bit of effort in setting up my status bar with py3status. It supports Sway directly, and did not actually require any change when migrating to Wayland. Unfortunately, I had trouble making nm-applet work. Based on this nm-applet.service, I found that you need to pass --indicator for it to show up at all. In theory, tray icon support was merged in 1.5, but in practice there are still several limitations, like icons not clickable. Also, on startup, nm-applet --indicator triggers this error in the Sway logs:

nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.325 [INFO] [swaybar/tray/host.c:24] Registering Status Notifier Item ':1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet'
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet IconPixmap: No such property  IconPixmap 
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet AttentionIconPixmap: No such property  AttentionIconPixmap 
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet ItemIsMenu: No such property  ItemIsMenu 
nov 11 22:36:10 angela sway[313419]: info: fcft.c:838: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00

... but that seems innocuous. The tray icon displays but is not clickable. Note that there is currently (November 2022) a pull request to hook up a "Tray D-Bus Menu" which, according to Reddit might fix this, or at least be somewhat relevant. If you don't see the icon, check the bar.tray_output property in the Sway config, try: tray_output *. The non-working tray was the biggest irritant in my migration. I have used nmtui to connect to new Wifi hotspots or change connection settings, but that doesn't support actions like "turn off WiFi". I eventually fixed this by switching from py3status to waybar, which was another yak horde shaving session, but ultimately, it worked.

Web browser: Firefox Firefox has had support for Wayland for a while now, with the team enabling it by default in nightlies around January 2022. It's actually not easy to figure out the state of the port, the meta bug report is still open and it's huge: it currently (Sept 2022) depends on 76 open bugs, it was opened twelve (2010) years ago, and it's still getting daily updates (mostly linking to other tickets). Firefox 106 presumably shipped with "Better screen sharing for Windows and Linux Wayland users", but I couldn't quite figure out what those were. TL;DR: echo MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 >> ~/.config/environment.d/firefox.conf && apt install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

How to enable it Firefox depends on this silly variable to start correctly under Wayland (otherwise it starts inside Xwayland and looks fuzzy and fails to screen share):

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox

To make the change permanent, many recipes recommend adding this to an environment startup script:

if [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" == "wayland" ]; then
    export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
fi

At least that's the theory. In practice, Sway doesn't actually run any startup shell script, so that can't possibly work. Furthermore, XDG_SESSION_TYPE is not actually set when starting Sway from gdm3 which I find really confusing, and I'm not the only one. So the above trick doesn't actually work, even if the environment (XDG_SESSION_TYPE) is set correctly, because we don't have conditionals in environment.d(5). (Note that systemd.environment-generator(7) do support running arbitrary commands to generate environment, but for some some do not support user-specific configuration files... Even then it may be a solution to have a conditional MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND environment, but I'm not sure it would work because ordering between those two isn't clear: maybe the XDG_SESSION_TYPE wouldn't be set just yet...) At first, I made this ridiculous script to workaround those issues. Really, it seems to me Firefox should just parse the XDG_SESSION_TYPE variable here... but then I realized that Firefox works fine in Xorg when the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND is set. So now I just set that variable in environment.d and It Just Works :

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

Screen sharing Out of the box, screen sharing doesn't work until you install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr or similar (e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-gnome on GNOME). I had to reboot for the change to take effect. Without those tools, it shows the usual permission prompt with "Use operating system settings" as the only choice, but when we accept... nothing happens. After installing the portals, it actualyl works, and works well! This was tested in Debian bookworm/testing with Firefox ESR 102 and Firefox 106. Major caveat: we can only share a full screen, we can't currently share just a window. The major upside to that is that, by default, it streams only one output which is actually what I want most of the time! See the screencast compatibility for more information on what is supposed to work. This is actually a huge improvement over the situation in Xorg, where Firefox can only share a window or all monitors, which led me to use Chromium a lot for video-conferencing. With this change, in other words, I will not need Chromium for anything anymore, whoohoo! If slurp, wofi, or bemenu are installed, one of them will be used to pick the monitor to share, which effectively acts as some minimal security measure. See xdg-desktop-portal-wlr(1) for how to configure that.

Side note: Chrome fails to share a full screen I was still using Google Chrome (or, more accurately, Debian's Chromium package) for some videoconferencing. It's mainly because Chromium was the only browser which will allow me to share only one of my two monitors, which is extremely useful. To start chrome with the Wayland backend, you need to use:

chromium  -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform -ozone-platform=wayland

If it shows an ugly gray border, check the Use system title bar and borders setting. It can do some screensharing. Sharing a window and a tab seems to work, but sharing a full screen doesn't: it's all black. Maybe not ready for prime time. And since Firefox can do what I need under Wayland now, I will not need to fight with Chromium to work under Wayland:

apt purge chromium

Note that a similar fix was necessary for Signal Desktop, see this commit. Basically you need to figure out a way to pass those same flags to signal:

--enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations --ozone-platform-hint=auto

Email: notmuch See Emacs, below.

File manager: thunar Unchanged.

News: feed2exec, gnus See Email, above, or Emacs in Editor, below.

Editor: Emacs okay-ish Emacs is being actively ported to Wayland. According to this LWN article, the first (partial, to Cairo) port was done in 2014 and a working port (to GTK3) was completed in 2021, but wasn't merged until late 2021. That is: after Emacs 28 was released (April 2022). So we'll probably need to wait for Emacs 29 to have native Wayland support in Emacs, which, in turn, is unlikely to arrive in time for the Debian bookworm freeze. There are, however, unofficial builds for both Emacs 28 and 29 provided by spwhitton which may provide native Wayland support. I tested the snapshot packages and they do not quite work well enough. First off, they completely take over the builtin Emacs they hijack the $PATH in /etc! and certain things are simply not working in my setup. For example, this hook never gets ran on startup:

(add-hook 'after-init-hook 'server-start t) 

Still, like many X11 applications, Emacs mostly works fine under Xwayland. The clipboard works as expected, for example. Scaling is a bit of an issue: fonts look fuzzy. I have heard anecdotal evidence of hard lockups with Emacs running under Xwayland as well, but haven't experienced any problem so far. I did experience a Wayland crash with the snapshot version however. TODO: look again at Wayland in Emacs 29.

Backups: borg Mostly irrelevant, as I do not use a GUI.

Color theme: srcery, redshift gammastep I am keeping Srcery as a color theme, in general. Redshift is another story: it has no support for Wayland out of the box, but it's apparently possible to apply a hack on the TTY before starting Wayland, with:

redshift -m drm -PO 3000

This tip is from the arch wiki which also has other suggestions for Wayland-based alternatives. Both KDE and GNOME have their own "red shifters", and for wlroots-based compositors, they (currently, Sept. 2022) list the following alternatives:

• gammastep: in Debian, panel indicator, seems good
• clight: uses the webcam to probe for light
• wl-gammaray: fork of gammastep, runs as a DBUS service
• wlsunset: WNPP

I configured gammastep with a simple gammastep.service file associated with the sway-session.target.

Display manager: lightdm gdm3 Switched because lightdm failed to start sway:

nov 16 16:41:43 angela sway[843121]: 00:00:00.002 [ERROR] [wlr] [libseat] [common/terminal.c:162] Could not open target tty: Permission denied

Possible alternatives:

• lightdm elephant greeter (I tried slick-greeter and ukui-greeter, neither could start the Sway session)
• greetd and QtGreet (former in Debian, not latter, which means we're stuck with the weird agreety which doesn't work at all)
• sddm: KDE's default, in Debian, probably heavier or as heavy as gdm3

Terminal: xterm foot One of the biggest question mark in this transition was what to do about Xterm. After writing two articles about terminal emulators as a professional journalist, decades of working on the terminal, and probably using dozens of different terminal emulators, I'm still not happy with any of them. This is such a big topic that I actually have an entire blog post specifically about this. For starters, using xterm under Xwayland works well enough, although the font scaling makes things look a bit too fuzzy. I have also tried foot: it ... just works! Fonts are much crisper than Xterm and Emacs. URLs are not clickable but the URL selector (control-shift-u) is just plain awesome (think "vimperator" for the terminal). There's cool hack to jump between prompts. Copy-paste works. True colors work. The word-wrapping is excellent: it doesn't lose one byte. Emojis are nicely sized and colored. Font resize works. There's even scroll back search (control-shift-r). Foot went from a question mark to being a reason to switch to Wayland, just for this little goodie, which says a lot about the quality of that software. The selection clicks are a not quite what I would expect though. In rxvt and others, you have the following patterns:

• single click: reset selection, or drag to select
• double: select word
• triple: select quotes or line
• quadruple: select line

I particularly find the "select quotes" bit useful. It seems like foot just supports double and triple clicks, with word and line selected. You can select a rectangle with control,. It correctly extends the selection word-wise with right click if double-click was first used. One major problem with Foot is that it's a new terminal, with its own termcap entry. Support for foot was added to ncurses in the 20210731 release, which was shipped after the current Debian stable release (Debian bullseye, which ships 6.2+20201114-2). A workaround for this problem is to install the foot-terminfo package on the remote host, which is available in Debian stable. This should eventually resolve itself, as Debian bookworm has a newer version. Note that some corrections were also shipped in the 20211113 release, but that is also shipped in Debian bookworm. That said, I am almost certain I will have to revert back to xterm under Xwayland at some point in the future. Back when I was using GNOME Terminal, it would mostly work for everything until I had to use the serial console on a (HP ProCurve) network switch, which have a fancy TUI that was basically unusable there. I fully expect such problems with foot, or any other terminal than xterm, for that matter. The foot wiki has good troubleshooting instructions as well. Update: I did find one tiny thing to improve with foot, and it's the default logging level which I found pretty verbose. After discussing it with the maintainer on IRC, I submitted this patch to tweak it, which I described like this on Mastodon:

today's reason why i will go to hell when i die (TRWIWGTHWID?): a 600-word, 63 lines commit log for a one line change: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/pulls/1215

It's Friday.

Launcher: rofi rofi?? rofi does not support Wayland. There was a rather disgraceful battle in the pull request that led to the creation of a fork (lbonn/rofi), so it's unclear how that will turn out. Given how relatively trivial problem space is, there is of course a profusion of options:

Tool	In Debian	Notes
alfred	yes	general launcher/assistant tool
bemenu	yes, bookworm+	inspired by dmenu
cerebro	no	Javascript ... uh... thing
dmenu-wl	no	fork of dmenu, straight port to Wayland
Fuzzel	ITP 982140	dmenu/drun replacement, app icon overlay
gmenu	no	drun replacement, with app icons
kickoff	no	dmenu/run replacement, fuzzy search, "snappy", history, copy-paste, Rust
krunner	yes	KDE's runner
mauncher	no	dmenu/drun replacement, math
nwg-launchers	no	dmenu/drun replacement, JSON config, app icons, nwg-shell project
Onagre	no	rofi/alfred inspired, multiple plugins, Rust
menu	no	dmenu/drun rewrite
Rofi (lbonn's fork)	no	see above
sirula	no	.desktop based app launcher
Ulauncher	ITP 949358	generic launcher like Onagre/rofi/alfred, might be overkill
tofi	yes, bookworm+	dmenu/drun replacement, C
wmenu	no	fork of dmenu-wl, but mostly a rewrite
Wofi	yes	dmenu/drun replacement, not actively maintained
yofi	no	dmenu/drun replacement, Rust

The above list comes partly from https://arewewaylandyet.com/ and awesome-wayland. It is likely incomplete. I have read some good things about bemenu, fuzzel, and wofi. A particularly tricky option is that my rofi password management depends on xdotool for some operations. At first, I thought this was just going to be (thankfully?) impossible, because we actually like the idea that one app cannot send keystrokes to another. But it seems there are actually alternatives to this, like wtype or ydotool, the latter which requires root access. wl-ime-type does that through the input-method-unstable-v2 protocol (sample emoji picker, but is not packaged in Debian. As it turns out, wtype just works as expected, and fixing this was basically a two-line patch. Another alternative, not in Debian, is wofi-pass. The other problem is that I actually heavily modified rofi. I use "modis" which are not actually implemented in wofi or tofi, so I'm left with reinventing those wheels from scratch or using the rofi + wayland fork... It's really too bad that fork isn't being reintegrated... For now, I'm actually still using rofi under Xwayland. The main downside is that fonts are fuzzy, but it otherwise just works. Note that wlogout could be a partial replacement (just for the "power menu").

Image viewers: geeqie ? I'm not very happy with geeqie in the first place, and I suspect the Wayland switch will just make add impossible things on top of the things I already find irritating (Geeqie doesn't support copy-pasting images). In practice, Geeqie doesn't seem to work so well under Wayland. The fonts are fuzzy and the thumbnail preview just doesn't work anymore (filed as Debian bug 1024092). It seems it also has problems with scaling. Alternatives:

• gwenview: KDE viewer, in Debian
• koko: KDE viewer, not in Debian?
• imv: x11/wayland viewer, scriptable, possible security issues and limited format support, in Debian
• mvi: mpv-based image viewer
• pix: KDE/mobile viewer, not in Debian
• swayimg: overlay, in Debian
• vimiv: vim-like keybindings, not in Debian

See also this list and that list for other list of image viewers, not necessarily ported to Wayland. TODO: pick an alternative to geeqie, nomacs would be gorgeous if it wouldn't be basically abandoned upstream (no release since 2020), has an unpatched CVE-2020-23884 since July 2020, does bad vendoring, and is in bad shape in Debian (4 minor releases behind). So for now I'm still grumpily using Geeqie.

Media player: mpv, gmpc / sublime This is basically unchanged. mpv seems to work fine under Wayland, better than Xorg on my new laptop (as mentioned in the introduction), and that before the version which improves Wayland support significantly, by bringing native Pipewire support and DMA-BUF support. gmpc is more of a problem, mainly because it is abandoned. See 2022-08-22-gmpc-alternatives for the full discussion, one of the alternatives there will likely support Wayland. Finally, I might just switch to sublime-music instead... In any case, not many changes here, thankfully.

Screensaver: xsecurelock swaylock I was previously using xss-lock and xsecurelock as a screensaver, with xscreensaver "hacks" as a backend for xsecurelock. The basic screensaver in Sway seems to be built with swayidle and swaylock. It's interesting because it's the same "split" design as xss-lock and xsecurelock. That, unfortunately, does not include the fancy "hacks" provided by xscreensaver, and that is unlikely to be implemented upstream. Other alternatives include gtklock and waylock (zig), which do not solve that problem either. It looks like swaylock-plugin, a swaylock fork, which at least attempts to solve this problem, although not directly using the real xscreensaver hacks. swaylock-effects is another attempt at this, but it only adds more effects, it doesn't delegate the image display. Other than that, maybe it's time to just let go of those funky animations and just let swaylock do it's thing, which is display a static image or just a black screen, which is fine by me. In the end, I am just using swayidle with a configuration based on the systemd integration wiki page but with additional tweaks from this service, see the resulting swayidle.service file. Interestingly, damjan also has a service for swaylock itself, although it's not clear to me what its purpose is...

Screenshot: maim grim, pubpaste I'm a heavy user of maim (and a package uploader in Debian). It looks like the direct replacement to maim (and slop) is grim (and slurp). There's also swappy which goes on top of grim and allows preview/edit of the resulting image, nice touch (not in Debian though). See also awesome-wayland screenshots for other alternatives: there are many, including X11 tools like Flameshot that also support Wayland. One key problem here was that I have my own screenshot / pastebin software which will needed an update for Wayland as well. That, thankfully, meant actually cleaning up a lot of horrible code that involved calling xterm and xmessage for user interaction. Now, pubpaste uses GTK for prompts and looks much better. (And before anyone freaks out, I already had to use GTK for proper clipboard support, so this isn't much of a stretch...)

Screen recorder: simplescreenrecorder wf-recorder In Xorg, I have used both peek or simplescreenrecorder for screen recordings. The former will work in Wayland, but has no sound support. The latter has a fork with Wayland support but it is limited and buggy ("doesn't support recording area selection and has issues with multiple screens"). It looks like wf-recorder will just do everything correctly out of the box, including audio support (with --audio, duh). It's also packaged in Debian. One has to wonder how this works while keeping the "between app security" that Wayland promises, however... Would installing such a program make my system less secure? Many other options are available, see the awesome Wayland screencasting list.

RSI: workrave nothing? Workrave has no support for Wayland. activity watch is a time tracker alternative, but is not a RSI watcher. KDE has rsiwatcher, but that's a bit too much on the heavy side for my taste. SafeEyes looks like an alternative at first, but it has many issues under Wayland (escape doesn't work, idle doesn't work, it just doesn't work really). timekpr-next could be an alternative as well, and has support for Wayland. I am also considering just abandoning workrave, even if I stick with Xorg, because it apparently introduces significant latency in the input pipeline. And besides, I've developed a pretty unhealthy alert fatigue with Workrave. I have used the program for so long that my fingers know exactly where to click to dismiss those warnings very effectively. It makes my work just more irritating, and doesn't fix the fundamental problem I have with computers.

Other apps This is a constantly changing list, of course. There's a bit of a "death by a thousand cuts" in migrating to Wayland because you realize how many things you were using are tightly bound to X.

• .Xresources - just say goodbye to that old resource system, it was used, in my case, only for rofi, xterm, and ... Xboard!?
• keyboard layout switcher: built-in to Sway since 2017 (PR 1505, 1.5rc2+), requires a small configuration change, see this answer as well, looks something like this command:

   swaymsg input 0:0:X11_keyboard xkb_layout de
  

  or using this config:

   input *  
       xkb_layout "ca,us"
       xkb_options "grp:sclk_toggle"
    
  

  That works refreshingly well, even better than in Xorg, I must say. swaykbdd is an alternative that supports per-window layouts (in Debian).
• wallpaper: currently using feh, will need a replacement, TODO: figure out something that does, like feh, a random shuffle. swaybg just loads a single image, duh. oguri might be a solution, but unmaintained, used here, not in Debian. wallutils is another option, also not in Debian. For now I just don't have a wallpaper, the background is a solid gray, which is better than Xorg's default (which is whatever crap was left around a buffer by the previous collection of programs, basically)
• notifications: currently using dunst in some places, which works well in both Xorg and Wayland, not a blocker, salut a possible alternative (not in Debian), damjan uses mako. TODO: install dunst everywhere
• notification area: I had trouble making nm-applet work. based on this nm-applet.service, I found that you need to pass --indicator. In theory, tray icon support was merged in 1.5, but in practice there are still several limitations, like icons not clickable. On startup, nm-applet --indicator triggers this error in the Sway logs:

   nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.325 [INFO] [swaybar/tray/host.c:24] Registering Status Notifier Item ':1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet'
   nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet IconPixmap: No such property  IconPixmap 
   nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet AttentionIconPixmap: No such property  AttentionIconPixmap 
   nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet ItemIsMenu: No such property  ItemIsMenu 
   nov 11 22:36:10 angela sway[313419]: info: fcft.c:838: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00
  

  ... but it seems innocuous. The tray icon displays but, as stated above, is not clickable. If you don't see the icon, check the bar.tray_output property in the Sway config, try: tray_output *. Note that there is currently (November 2022) a pull request to hook up a "Tray D-Bus Menu" which, according to Reddit might fix this, or at least be somewhat relevant. This was the biggest irritant in my migration. I have used nmtui to connect to new Wifi hotspots or change connection settings, but that doesn't support actions like "turn off WiFi". I eventually fixed this by switching from py3status to waybar.
• window switcher: in i3 I was using this bespoke i3-focus script, which doesn't work under Sway, swayr an option, not in Debian. So I put together this other bespoke hack from multiple sources, which works.
• PDF viewer: currently using atril (which supports Wayland), could also just switch to zatura/mupdf permanently, see also calibre for a discussion on document viewers

See also this list of useful addons and this other list for other app alternatives.

More X11 / Wayland equivalents For all the tools above, it's not exactly clear what options exist in Wayland, or when they do, which one should be used. But for some basic tools, it seems the options are actually quite clear. If that's the case, they should be listed here:

X11	Wayland	In Debian
arandr	wdisplays	yes
autorandr	kanshi	yes
xdotool	wtype	yes
xev	wev	yes
xlsclients	swaymsg -t get_tree	yes
xrandr	wlr-randr	yes

lswt is a more direct replacement for xlsclients but is not packaged in Debian. See also:

• https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway
• https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide

Note that arandr and autorandr are not directly part of X. arewewaylandyet.com refers to a few alternatives. We suggest wdisplays and kanshi above (see also this service file) but wallutils can also do the autorandr stuff, apparently, and nwg-displays can do the arandr part. Neither are packaged in Debian yet. So I have tried wdisplays and it Just Works, and well. The UI even looks better and more usable than arandr, so another clean win from Wayland here. TODO: test kanshi as a autorandr replacement

Other issues

systemd integration I've had trouble getting session startup to work. This is partly because I had a kind of funky system to start my session in the first place. I used to have my whole session started from .xsession like this:

#!/bin/sh
. ~/.shenv
systemctl --user import-environment
exec systemctl --user start --wait xsession.target

But obviously, the xsession.target is not started by the Sway session. It seems to just start a default.target, which is really not what we want because we want to associate the services directly with the graphical-session.target, so that they don't start when logging in over (say) SSH. damjan on #debian-systemd showed me his sway-setup which features systemd integration. It involves starting a different session in a completely new .desktop file. That work was submitted upstream but refused on the grounds that "I'd rather not give a preference to any particular init system." Another PR was abandoned because "restarting sway does not makes sense: that kills everything". The work was therefore moved to the wiki. So. Not a great situation. The upstream wiki systemd integration suggests starting the systemd target from within Sway, which has all sorts of problems:

• you don't get Sway logs anywhere
• control groups are all messed up

I have done a lot of work trying to figure this out, but I remember that starting systemd from Sway didn't actually work for me: my previously configured systemd units didn't correctly start, and especially not with the right $PATH and environment. So I went down that rabbit hole and managed to correctly configure Sway to be started from the systemd --user session. I have partly followed the wiki but also picked ideas from damjan's sway-setup and xdbob's sway-services. Another option is uwsm (not in Debian). This is the config I have in .config/systemd/user/:

• sway.service
• sway-session.target

I have also configured those services, but that's somewhat optional:

• gammastep.service
• swayidle.service
• wcolortaillog.service
• wterminal.service

You will also need at least part of my sway/config, which sends the systemd notification (because, no, Sway doesn't support any sort of readiness notification, that would be too easy). And you might like to see my swayidle-config while you're there. Finally, you need to hook this up somehow to the login manager. This is typically done with a desktop file, so drop sway-session.desktop in /usr/share/wayland-sessions and sway-user-service somewhere in your $PATH (typically /usr/bin/sway-user-service). The session then looks something like this:

$ systemd-cgls   head -101
Control group /:
-.slice
 user.slice (#472)
    user.invocation_id: bc405c6341de4e93a545bde6d7abbeec
    trusted.invocation_id: bc405c6341de4e93a545bde6d7abbeec
   user-1000.slice (#10072)
      user.invocation_id: 08f40f5c4bcd4fd6adfd27bec24e4827
      trusted.invocation_id: 08f40f5c4bcd4fd6adfd27bec24e4827
     user@1000.service   (#10156)
        user.delegate: 1
        trusted.delegate: 1
        user.invocation_id: 76bed72a1ffb41dca9bfda7bb174ef6b
        trusted.invocation_id: 76bed72a1ffb41dca9bfda7bb174ef6b
       session.slice (#10282)
         xdg-document-portal.service (#12248)
           9533 /usr/libexec/xdg-document-portal
           9542 fusermount3 -o rw,nosuid,nodev,fsname=portal,auto_unmount,subt 
         xdg-desktop-portal.service (#12211)
           9529 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal
         pipewire-pulse.service (#10778)
           6002 /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
         wireplumber.service (#10519)
           5944 /usr/bin/wireplumber
         gvfs-daemon.service (#10667)
           5960 /usr/libexec/gvfsd
         gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor.service (#10852)
           6021 /usr/libexec/gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor
         at-spi-dbus-bus.service (#11481)
           6210 /usr/libexec/at-spi-bus-launcher
           6216 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --config-file=/usr/share/defaults/at-spi2 
           6450 /usr/libexec/at-spi2-registryd --use-gnome-session
         pipewire.service (#10403)
           5940 /usr/bin/pipewire
         dbus.service (#10593)
           5946 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --session --address=systemd: --nofork --n 
       background.slice (#10324)
         tracker-miner-fs-3.service (#10741)
           6001 /usr/libexec/tracker-miner-fs-3
       app.slice (#10240)
         xdg-permission-store.service (#12285)
           9536 /usr/libexec/xdg-permission-store
         gammastep.service (#11370)
           6197 gammastep
         dunst.service (#11958)
           7460 /usr/bin/dunst
         wterminal.service (#13980)
           69100 foot --title pop-up
           69101 /bin/bash
           77660 sudo systemd-cgls
           77661 head -101
           77662 wl-copy
           77663 sudo systemd-cgls
           77664 systemd-cgls
         syncthing.service (#11995)
           7529 /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0 --verbo 
           7537 /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0 --verbo 
         dconf.service (#10704)
           5967 /usr/libexec/dconf-service
         gnome-keyring-daemon.service (#10630)
           5951 /usr/bin/gnome-keyring-daemon --foreground --components=pkcs11 
         gcr-ssh-agent.service (#10963)
           6035 /usr/libexec/gcr-ssh-agent /run/user/1000/gcr
         swayidle.service (#11444)
           6199 /usr/bin/swayidle -w
         nm-applet.service (#11407)
           6198 /usr/bin/nm-applet --indicator
         wcolortaillog.service (#11518)
           6226 foot colortaillog
           6228 /bin/sh /home/anarcat/bin/colortaillog
           6230 sudo journalctl -f
           6233 ccze -m ansi
           6235 sudo journalctl -f
           6236 journalctl -f
         afuse.service (#10889)
           6051 /usr/bin/afuse -o mount_template=sshfs -o transform_symlinks - 
         gpg-agent.service (#13547)
           51662 /usr/bin/gpg-agent --supervised
           51719 scdaemon --multi-server
         emacs.service (#10926)
            6034 /usr/bin/emacs --fg-daemon
           33203 /usr/bin/aspell -a -m -d en --encoding=utf-8
         xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.service (#12322)
           9546 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
         xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.service (#12359)
           9555 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
         sway.service (#11037)
           6037 /usr/bin/sway
           6181 swaybar -b bar-0
           6209 py3status
           6309 /usr/bin/i3status -c /tmp/py3status_oy4ntfnq
           6969 Xwayland :0 -rootless -terminate -core -listen 29 -listen 30 - 
       init.scope (#10198)
         5909 /lib/systemd/systemd --user
         5911 (sd-pam)
     session-7.scope (#10440)
       5895 gdm-session-worker [pam/gdm-password]
       6028 /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session --register-session sway-user-serv 
[...]

I think that's pretty neat.

• TODO: consider this improved script: https://github.com/xdbob/sway-services/blob/master/bin/sway-user-service
• TODO: move config into Puppet so it's in sync
• TODO: maybe submit as a PR on the Debian package?

Environment propagation At first, my terminals and rofi didn't have the right $PATH, which broke a lot of my workflow. It's hard to tell exactly how Wayland gets started or where to inject environment. This discussion suggests a few alternatives and this Debian bug report discusses this issue as well. I eventually picked environment.d(5) since I already manage my user session with systemd, and it fixes a bunch of other problems. I used to have a .shenv that I had to manually source everywhere. The only problem with that approach is that it doesn't support conditionals, but that's something that's rarely needed.

Pipewire This is a whole topic onto itself, but migrating to Wayland also involves using Pipewire if you want screen sharing to work. You can actually keep using Pulseaudio for audio, that said, but that migration is actually something I've wanted to do anyways: Pipewire's design seems much better than Pulseaudio, as it folds in JACK features which allows for pretty neat tricks. (Which I should probably show in a separate post, because this one is getting rather long.) I first tried this migration in Debian bullseye, and it didn't work very well. Ardour would fail to export tracks and I would get into weird situations where streams would just drop mid-way. A particularly funny incident is when I was in a meeting and I couldn't hear my colleagues speak anymore (but they could) and I went on blabbering on my own for a solid 5 minutes until I realized what was going on. By then, people had tried numerous ways of letting me know that something was off, including (apparently) coughing, saying "hello?", chat messages, IRC, and so on, until they just gave up and left. I suspect that was also a Pipewire bug, but it could also have been that I muted the tab by error, as I recently learned that clicking on the little tiny speaker icon on a tab mutes that tab. Since the tab itself can get pretty small when you have lots of them, it's actually quite frequently that I mistakenly mute tabs. Anyways. Point is: I already knew how to make the migration, and I had already documented how to make the change in Puppet. It's basically:

apt install pipewire pipewire-audio-client-libraries pipewire-pulse wireplumber 

Then, as a regular user:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user --now disable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user --now enable pipewire pipewire-pulse
systemctl --user mask pulseaudio

An optional (but key, IMHO) configuration you should also make is to "switch on connect", which will make your Bluetooth or USB headset automatically be the default route for audio, when connected. In ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/autoconnect.conf:

context.exec = [
      path = "pactl"        args = "load-module module-always-sink"  
      path = "pactl"        args = "load-module module-switch-on-connect"  
    #  path = "/usr/bin/sh"  args = "~/.config/pipewire/default.pw"  
]

See the excellent as usual Arch wiki page about Pipewire for that trick and more information about Pipewire. Note that you must not put the file in ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf (or pipewire-pulse.conf, maybe) directly, as that will break your setup. If you want to add to that file, first copy the template from /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf first. So far I'm happy with Pipewire in bookworm, but I've heard mixed reports from it. I have high hopes it will become the standard media server for Linux in the coming months or years, which is great because I've been (rather boldly, I admit) on the record saying I don't like PulseAudio. Rereading this now, I feel it might have been a little unfair, as "over-engineered and tries to do too many things at once" applies probably even more to Pipewire than PulseAudio (since it also handles video dispatching). That said, I think Pipewire took the right approach by implementing existing interfaces like Pulseaudio and JACK. That way we're not adding a third (or fourth?) way of doing audio in Linux; we're just making the server better.

Keypress drops Sometimes I lose keyboard presses. This correlates with the following warning from Sway:

d c 06 10:36:31 curie sway[343384]: 23:32:14.034 [ERROR] [wlr] [libinput] event5  - SONiX USB Keyboard: client bug: event processing lagging behind by 37ms, your system is too slow 

... and corresponds to an open bug report in Sway. It seems the "system is too slow" should really be "your compositor is too slow" which seems to be the case here on this older system (curie). It doesn't happen often, but it does happen, particularly when a bunch of busy processes start in parallel (in my case: a linter running inside a container and notmuch new). The proposed fix for this in Sway is to gain real time privileges and add the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to the binary. We'll see how that goes in Debian once 1.8 gets released and shipped.

Improvements over i3

Tiling improvements There's a lot of improvements Sway could bring over using plain i3. There are pretty neat auto-tilers that could replicate the configurations I used to have in Xmonad or Awesome, see:

• autotiling
• swaymonad

Display latency tweaks TODO: You can tweak the display latency in wlroots compositors with the max_render_time parameter, possibly getting lower latency than X11 in the end.

Sound/brightness changes notifications TODO: Avizo can display a pop-up to give feedback on volume and brightness changes. Not in Debian. Other alternatives include SwayOSD and sway-nc, also not in Debian.

Debugging tricks The xeyes (in the x11-apps package) will run in Wayland, and can actually be used to easily see if a given window is also in Wayland. If the "eyes" follow the cursor, the app is actually running in xwayland, so not natively in Wayland. Another way to see what is using Wayland in Sway is with the command:

swaymsg -t get_tree

Other documentation

• awesome-wayland
• arewewaylandyet.com
• hacktivist.me notes
• Arch Linux wiki
• Gentoo apps list
• Sway: useful addons
• i3 migration guide

Conclusion In general, this took me a long time, but it mostly works. The tray icon situation is pretty frustrating, but there's a workaround and I have high hopes it will eventually fix itself. I'm also actually worried about the DisplayLink support because I eventually want to be using this, but hopefully that's another thing that will hopefully fix itself before I need it.

A word on the security model I'm kind of worried about all the hacks that have been added to Wayland just to make things work. Pretty much everywhere we need to, we punched a hole in the security model:

• windows can spy on each other (although xdg-desktop-portal-wlr does confirm if you have some chooser installed, see xdg-desktop-portal-wrl(5))
• windows can type over each other (through e.g. wtype through the virtual-keyboard protocol)
• windows can overlay on top of each other (so one app could, for example, spoof a password dialog, through the layer-shell protocol)

Wikipedia describes the security properties of Wayland as it "isolates the input and output of every window, achieving confidentiality, integrity and availability for both." I'm not sure those are actually realized in the actual implementation, because of all those holes punched in the design, at least in Sway. For example, apparently the GNOME compositor doesn't have the virtual-keyboard protocol, but they do have (another?!) text input protocol. Wayland does offer a better basis to implement such a system, however. It feels like the Linux applications security model lacks critical decision points in the UI, like the user approving "yes, this application can share my screen now". Applications themselves might have some of those prompts, but it's not mandatory, and that is worrisome.

1. a home-made Wireguard VPN, deployed with Puppet
2. a Wireguard VPN overlay, with Tailscale or equivalent
3. IPv6, native or with tunnels

Wireguard Puppet modules As is (unfortunately) typical with Puppet, I found multiple different modules to talk with Wireguard.

module	score	downloads	release	stars	watch	forks	license	docs	contrib	issue	PR	notes
halyard	3.1	1,807	2022-10-14	0	0	0	MIT	no				requires firewall and Configvault_Write modules?
voxpupuli	5.0	4,201	2022-10-01	2	23	7	AGPLv3	good	1/9	1/4	1/61	optionnally configures ferm, uses systemd-networkd, recommends systemd module with manage_systemd to true, purges unknown keys
abaranov	4.7	17,017	2021-08-20	9	3	38	MIT	okay	1/17	4/7	4/28	requires pre-generated private keys
arrnorets	3.1	16,646	2020-12-28	1	2	1	Apache-2	okay	1	0	0	requires pre-generated private keys?

The voxpupuli module seems to be the most promising. The abaranov module is more popular and has more contributors, but it has more open issues and PRs. More critically, the voxpupuli module was written after the abaranov author didn't respond to a PR from the voxpupuli author trying to add more automation (namely private key management). It looks like setting up a wireguard network would be as simple as this on node A:

wireguard::interface   'wg0':
  source_addresses => ['2003:4f8:c17:4cf::1', '149.9.255.4'],
  public_key       => $facts['wireguard_pubkeys']['nodeB'],
  endpoint         => 'nodeB.example.com:53668',
  addresses        => [ 'Address' => '192.168.123.6/30', , 'Address' => 'fe80::beef:1/64' ,],
 

This configuration come from this pull request I sent to the module to document how to use that fact. Note that the addresses used here are examples that shouldn't be reused and do not confirm to RFC5737 ("IPv4 Address Blocks Reserved for Documentation", 192.0.2.0/24 (TEST-NET-1), 198.51.100.0/24 (TEST-NET-2), and 203.0.113.0/24 (TEST-NET-3)) or RFC3849 ("IPv6 Address Prefix Reserved for Documentation", 2001:DB8::/32), but that's another story. (To avoid boostrapping problems, the resubmit-facts configuration could be used so that other nodes facts are more immediately available.) One problem with the above approach is that you explicitly need to take care of routing, network topology, and addressing. This can get complicated quickly, especially if you have lots of devices, behind NAT, in multiple locations (which is basically my life at home, unfortunately). Concretely, basic Wireguard only support one peer behind NAT. There are some workarounds for this, but they generally imply a relay server of some sort, or some custom registry, it's kind of a mess. And this is where overlay networks like Tailscale come in.

Tailscale Tailscale is basically designed to deal with this problem. It's not fully opensource, but pretty close, and they have an interesting philosophy behind that. The client is opensource, and there is an opensource version of the server side, called headscale. They have recently (late 2022) hired the main headscale developer while promising to keep supporting it, which is pretty amazing. Tailscale provides an overlay network based on Wireguard, where each peer basically has a peer-to-peer encrypted connexion, with automatic key rotation. They also ship a multitude of applications and features on top of that like file sharing, keyless SSH access, and so on. The authentication layer is based on an existing SSO provider, you don't just register with Tailscale with new account, you login with Google, Microsoft, or GitHub (which, really, is still Microsoft). The Headscale server ships with many features out of that:

• Full "base" support of Tailscale's features
• Configurable DNS
  • Split DNS
  • MagicDNS (each user gets a name)
• Node registration
  • Single-Sign-On (via Open ID Connect)
  • Pre authenticated key
• Taildrop (File Sharing)
• Access control lists
• Support for multiple IP ranges in the tailnet
• Dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6)
• Routing advertising (including exit nodes)
• Ephemeral nodes
• Embedded DERP server (AKA NAT-to-NAT traversal)

Neither project (client or server) is in Debian (RFP 972439 for the client, none filed yet for the server), which makes deploying this for my use case rather problematic. Their install instructions are basically a curl bash but they also provide packages for various platforms. Their Debian install instructions are surprisingly good, and check most of the third party checklist we're trying to establish. (It's missing a pin.) There's also a Puppet module for tailscale, naturally. What I find a little disturbing with Tailscale is that you not only need to trust Tailscale with authorizing your devices, you also basically delegate that trust also to the SSO provider. So, in my case, GitHub (or anyone who compromises my account there) can penetrate the VPN. A little scary. Tailscale is also kind of an "all or nothing" thing. They have MagicDNS, file transfers, all sorts of things, but those things require you to hook up your resolver with Tailscale. In fact, Tailscale kind of assumes you will use their nameservers, and have suffered great lengths to figure out how to do that. And naturally, here, it doesn't seem to work reliably; my resolv.conf somehow gets replaced and the magic resolution of the ts.net domain fails. (I wonder why we can't opt in to just publicly resolve the ts.net domain. I don't care if someone can enumerate the private IP addreses or machines in use in my VPN, at least I don't care as much as fighting with resolv.conf everywhere.) Because I mostly have access to the routers on the networks I'm on, I don't think I'll be using tailscale in the long term. But it's pretty impressive stuff: in the time it took me to even review the Puppet modules to configure Wireguard (which is what I'll probably end up doing), I was up and running with Tailscale (but with a broken DNS, naturally). (And yes, basic Wireguard won't bring me DNS either, but at least I won't have to trust Tailscale's Debian packages, and Tailscale, and Microsoft, and GitHub with this thing.)

IPv6 IPv6 is actually what is supposed to solve this. Not NAT port forwarding crap, just real IPs everywhere. The problem is: even though IPv6 adoption is still growing, it's kind of reaching a plateau at around 40% world-wide, with Canada lagging behind at 34%. It doesn't help that major ISPs in Canada (e.g. Bell Canada, Videotron) don't care at all about IPv6 (e.g. Videotron in beta since 2011). So we can't rely on those companies to do the right thing here. The typical solution here is often to use a tunnel like HE's tunnelbroker.net. It's kind of tricky to configure, but once it's done, it works. You get end-to-end connectivity as long as everyone on the network is on IPv6. And that's really where the problem lies here; the second one of your nodes can't setup such a tunnel, you're kind of stuck and that tool completely breaks down. IPv6 tunnels also don't give you the kind of security a VPN provides as well, naturally. The other downside of a tunnel is you don't really get peer-to-peer connectivity: you go through the tunnel. So you can expect higher latencies and possibly lower bandwidth as well. Also, HE.net doesn't currently charge for this service (and they've been doing this for a long time), but this could change in the future (just like Tailscale, that said). Concretely, the latency difference is rather minimal, Google:

--- ipv6.l.google.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0,00% packet loss, time 136,8ms
RTT[ms]: min = 13, median = 14, p(90) = 14, max = 15
--- google.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0,00% packet loss, time 136,0ms
RTT[ms]: min = 13, median = 13, p(90) = 14, max = 14

In the case of GitHub, latency is actually lower, interestingly:

--- ipv6.github.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0,00% packet loss, time 134,6ms
RTT[ms]: min = 13, median = 13, p(90) = 14, max = 14
--- github.com ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0,00% packet loss, time 293,1ms
RTT[ms]: min = 29, median = 29, p(90) = 29, max = 30

That is because HE.net peers directly with my ISP and Fastly (which is behind GitHub.com's IPv6, apparently?), so it's only 6 hops away. While over IPv4, the ping goes over New York, before landing AWS's Ashburn, Virginia datacenters, for a whopping 13 hops... I managed setup a HE.net tunnel at home, because I also need IPv6 for other reasons (namely debugging at work). My first attempt at setting this up in the office failed, but now that I found the openwrt.org guide, it worked... for a while, and I was able to produce the above, encouraging, mini benchmarks. Unfortunately, a few minutes later, IPv6 just went down again. And the problem with that is that many programs (and especially OpenSSH) do not respect the Happy Eyeballs protocol (RFC 8305), which means various mysterious "hangs" at random times on random applications. It's kind of a terrible user experience, on top of breaking the one thing it's supposed to do, of course, which is to give me transparent access to all the nodes I maintain. Even worse, it would still be a problem for other remote nodes I might setup where I might not have acess to the router to setup the tunnel. It's also not absolutely clear what happens if you setup the same tunnel in two places... Presumably, something is smart enough to distribute only a part of the /48 block selectively, but I don't really feel like going that far, considering how flaky the setup is already.

Other options If this post sounds a little biased towards IPv6 and Wireguard, it's because it is. I would like everyone to migrate to IPv6 already, and Wireguard seems like a simple and sound system. I'm aware of many other options to make VPNs. So before anyone jumps in and says "but what about...", do know that I have personnally experimented with:

• tinc: nice, automatic meshing, used for the Montreal mesh, serious design flaws in the crypto that make it generally unsafe to use; supposedly, v1.1 (or 2.0?) will fix this, but that's been promised for over a decade by now
• ipsec, specifically strongswan: hard to configure (especially configure correctly!), harder even to debug, otherwise really nice because transparent (e.g. no need for special subnets), used at work, but also considering a replacement there because it's a major barrier to entry to train new staff
• OpenVPN: mostly used as a client for [VPN service][]s like Riseup VPN or Mullvad, mostly relevant for client-server configurations, not really peer-to-peer, shared secrets or TLS, kind of an hassle to maintain, see also SoftEther for an alternative implementation

All of those solutions have significant problems and I do not wish to use any of those for this project. Also note that Tailscale is only one of many projects laid over Wireguard to do that kind of thing, see this LWN review for others (basically NetbBird, Firezone, and Netmaker).

Future work Those are options that came up after writing this post, and might warrant further examination in the future.

• Meshbird, a "distributed private networking" with little information about how it actually works other than "encrypted with strong AES-256"
• Nebula, "A scalable overlay networking tool with a focus on performance, simplicity and security", written by Slack people to replace IPsec, docs, runs as an overlay for Slack's 50k node network, only packaged in Debian experimental, lagging behind upstream (1.4.0, from May 2021 vs upstream's 1.6.1 from September 2022), requires a central CA, Golang, I'm in "wait and see" mode for now
• n2n: "layer two VPN", seems packaged in Debian but inactive
• ouroboros: "peer-to-peer packet network prototype", sounds and seems complicated
• QuickTUN is interesting because it's just a small wrapper around NaCL, and it's in Debian... but maybe too obscure for my own good
• unetd: Wireguard-based full mesh networking from OpenWRT, not in Debian
• vpncloud: "high performance peer-to-peer mesh VPN over UDP supporting strong encryption, NAT traversal and a simple configuration", sounds interesting, not in Debian
• Yggdrasil: actually a pretty good match for my use case, but I didn't think of it when starting the experiments here; packaged in Debian, with the Golang version planned, Puppet module; major caveat: nodes exposed publicly inside the global mesh unless configured otherwise (firewall suggested), requires port forwards, alpha status

Conclusion Right now, I'm going to deploy Wireguard tunnels with Puppet. It seems like kind of a pain in the back, but it's something I will be able to reuse for work, possibly completely replacing strongswan. I have another Puppet module for IPsec which I was planning to publish, but now I'm thinking I should just abort that and replace everything with Wireguard, assuming we still need VPNs at work in the future. (I have a number of reasons to believe we might not need any in the near future anyways...)

I have just filed a complaint with the CRTC about my phone provider's outrageous fees. This is a copy of the complaint.

• 2$/min
• 0.75$/text
• 10$/20MB

• unlimited data
• 1000 minutes
• 500 text messages
• 12GB data elsewhere in Europe

I have no illusions about this having any effect. I thought of filing such a complain after the Rogers outage as well, but felt I had less of a standing there because I wasn't affected that much (e.g. I didn't have a life-threatening situation myself). This, however, was ridiculous and frustrating enough to trigger this outrage. We'll see how it goes...

"We will respond to you within 10 working days."

Response from CRTC They did respond within 10 days. Here is the full response:

Dear Antoine Beaupr : Thank you for contacting us about your mobile telephone international roaming service plan rates concern with Fido Solutions Inc. (Fido). In Canada, mobile telephone service is offered on a competitive basis. Therefore, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is not involved in Fido's terms of service (including international roaming service plan rates), billing and marketing practices, quality of service issues and customer relations. If you haven't already done so, we encourage you to escalate your concern to a manager if you believe the answer you have received from Fido's customer service is not satisfactory. Based on the information that you have provided, this may also appear to be a Competition Bureau matter. The Competition Bureau is responsible for administering and enforcing the Competition Act, and deals with issues such as false or misleading representations, deceptive marketing practices and collusion. You can reach the Competition Bureau by calling 1-800-348-5358 (toll-free), by TTY (for deaf and hard of hearing people) by calling 1-866-694-8389 (toll-free). For more contact information, please visit http://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/eng/00157.html When consumers are not satisfied with the service they are offered, we encourage them to compare the products and services of other providers in their area and look for a company that can better match their needs. The following tool helps to show choices of providers in your area: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/comm/fourprov.htm Thank you for sharing your concern with us.

In other words, complain with Fido, or change providers. Don't complain to us, we don't manage the telcos, they self-regulate. Great job, CRTC. This is going great. This is exactly why we're one of the most expensive countries on the planet for cell phone service.

Live chat with Fido Interestingly, the day after I received that response from the CRTC, I received this email from Fido, while traveling:

Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2022 10:10:00 -0400 From: Fido DONOTREPLY@fido.ca To: REDACTED Subject: Courriel d avis d itin rance Fido Roaming Welcome Confirmation Fido Date : 13 septembre 2022
Num ro de compte : [redacted] Bonjour
Antoine Beaupr ! Nous vous crivons pour vous indiquer qu au moins un utilisateur inscrit votre compte s est r cemment connect un r seau en itin rance.
Vous trouverez ci-dessous le message texte de bienvenue en itin rance envoy l utilisateur (ou aux utilisateurs), qui contenait les tarifs d itin rance
applicables. Message texte de bienvenue en itin rance Destinataire : REDACTED Date et heure : 2022-09-13 / 10:10:00
Allo, ici Fido : Bienvenue destination! Vous tes inscrit Fido Nomade alors utilisez vos donn es, parlez et textez comme vous le faites la
maison. Depuis le 1 mars 2022 le tarif cette destination pour 15 $/jour (+ taxes) et valide tous les jours jusqu' 23 h 59 HE, peu importe le fuseau
horaire dans lequel vous vous trouvez. Bon voyage! Des questions? Consultez fido.ca/m/itinerance ou composez +15149333436 (sans frais). Besoin d aide?

• PLANIFIEZ UN VOYAGE AVEC Fido NomadeMC
  D couvrez nos options d itin rance et restez en contact l tranger sans vous soucier de votre
  facture.

D tails

• G rez votre compte
  G rez vos produits et services Fido la maison ou sur la route gr ce Mon
  Compte.

D tails Ce courriel est produit automatiquement; veuillez ne pas y r pondre. Ce courriel (et toute pi ce jointe) est confidentiel. Si vous n tes pas le destinataire,
veuillez supprimer le pr sent message et en d truire toute copie. FIDO SOLUTIONS 800, RUE DE LA GAUCHETI RE OUEST
BUREAU 4000 MONTR AL (QU BEC) H5A 1K3
Fido

I found that message utterly confusing (and yes, I can read french). Basically, it says that some user (presumably me!) connected to the network with roaming. I did just disabled airplane mode on my phone to debug a Syncthing bug but had not enabled roaming. So this message seemed to say that I would be charged 15$ (per DAY!) for roaming from now on. Confused, I tried their live chat to try to clarify things, worried I would get charged even more for calling tech support on *611. This is a transcript of the chat:

F: Hi! What are we doing today? Type in your question or choose from the options below: * Track my Equipment Order * View Bill Online * Payment Options * iPhone 14 Pre-Order A: i received a message about roaming while abroad but i did not enable roaming on my phone, will i be charged anyways? F: I think I know what you re asking for. Select the topic that best matches your request or try rephrasing your question. A: no F: Thank you, this will help us to improve! Would you like to chat with a specialist? Chat with a specialist I'll get a specialist to help you with this. It appears that you're not signed in. Your session may have timed out. To save time and identify your account details, please sign in to My Account.

• Sign in
• I'm not able to sign in

Have any questions specific to your Fido account? To service you faster, please identify yourself by completing the form below. A: Personal info Form submitted F: Thank you! I'll connect you with the next available specialist. Your chat is being transferred to a Live Chat agent. Thanks for your patience. We are here to assist you and we kindly ask that our team members be treated with respect and dignity. Please note that abuse directed towards any Consumer Care Specialist will not be tolerated and will result in the termination of your conversation with us. All of our agents are with other customers at the moment. Your chat is in a priority sequence and someone will be with you as soon as possible. Thanks! Thanks for continuing to hold. An agent will be with you as soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience. We re getting more Live Chat requests than usual so it s taking longer to answer. Your chat is still in a priority sequence and will be answered as soon as an agent becomes available. Thank you so much for your patience we're sorry for the wait. Your chat is still in a priority sequence and will be answered as soon as possible. Hi, I'm [REDACTED] from Fido in [REDACTED]. May I have your name please? A: hi i am antoine, nice to meet you sorry to use the live chat, but it's not clear to me i can safely use my phone to call support, because i am in ireland and i'm worried i'll get charged for the call F: Thank You Antoine , I see you waited to speak with me today, thank you for your patience.Apart from having to wait, how are you today? A: i am good thank you

[... delay ...]

A: should i restate my question? F: Yes please what is the concern you have? A: i have received an email from fido saying i someone used my phone for roaming it's in french (which is fine), but that's the gist of it i am traveling to ireland for a week i do not want to use fido's services here... i have set the phon eto airplane mode for most of my time here F: The SMS just says what will be the charges if you used any services. A: but today i have mistakenly turned that off and did not turn on roaming well it's not a SMS, it's an email F: Yes take out the sim and keep it safe.Turun off or On for roaming you cant do it as it is part of plan. A: wat F: if you used any service you will be charged if you not used any service you will not be charged. A: you are saying i need to physically take the SIM out of the phone? i guess i will have a fun conversation with your management once i return from this trip not that i can do that now, given that, you know, i nee dto take the sim out of this phone fun times F: Yes that is better as most of the customer end up using some kind of service and get charged for roaming. A: well that is completely outrageous roaming is off on the phone i shouldn't get charged for roaming, since roaming is off on the phone i also don't get why i cannot be clearly told whether i will be charged or not the message i have received says i will be charged if i use the service and you seem to say i could accidentally do that easily can you tell me if i have indeed used service sthat will incur an extra charge? are incoming text messages free? F: I understand but it is on you if you used some data SMS or voice mail you can get charged as you used some services.And we cant check anything for now you have to wait for next bill. and incoming SMS are free rest all service comes under roaming. That is the reason I suggested take out the sim from phone and keep it safe or always keep the phone or airplane mode. A: okay can you confirm whether or not i can call fido by voice for support? i mean for free F: So use your Fido sim and call on +1-514-925-4590 on this number it will be free from out side Canada from Fido sim. A: that is quite counter-intuitive, but i guess i will trust you on that thank you, i think that will be all F: Perfect, Again, my name is [REDACTED] and it s been my pleasure to help you today. Thank you for being a part of the Fido family and have a great day! A: you too

So, in other words:

1. they can't tell me if I've actually been roaming
2. they can't tell me how much it's going to cost me
3. I should remove the SIM card from my phone (!?) or turn on airplane mode, but the former is safer
4. I can call Fido support, but not on the usual *611, and instead on that long-distance-looking phone number, and yes, that means turning off airplane mode and putting the SIM card in, which contradicts step 3

Also notice how the phone number from the live chat (+1-514-925-4590) is different than the one provided in the email (15149333436). So who knows what would have happened if I would have called the latter. The former is mentioned in their contact page. I guess the next step is to call Fido over the phone and talk to a manager, which is what the CRTC told me to do in the first place... I ended up talking with a manager (another 1h phone call) and they confirmed there is no other package available at Fido for this. At best they can provide me with a credit if I mistakenly use the roaming by accident to refund me, but that's it. The manager also confirmed that I cannot know if I have actually used any data before reading the bill, which is issued on the 15th of every month, but only available... three days later, at which point I'll be back home anyways. Fantastic.

GMPC status and features GMPC, in particular, is basically dead. The upstream website domain has been lost and there has been no release in ages. It's built with GTK2 so it's bound to be destroyed in a fire at some point anyways. Still: it's really an awesome client. It has:

• cover support
• lyrics and tabs lookups (although those typically fail now)
• last.fm lookups
• high performance: loading thousands of artists or tracks is almost instant
• repeat/single/consume/shuffle settings (single is particularly nice)
• (global) keyboard shortcuts
• file, artist, genre, tag browser
• playlist editor
• plugins
• multi-profile support
• avahi support
• shoutcast support

Regarding performance, the only thing that I could find to slow down gmpc is to make it load all of my 40k+ artists in a playlist. That's slow, but it's probably understandable. It's basically impossible to find a client that satisfies all of those. But here are the clients that I found, alphabetically. I restrict myself to Linux-based clients.

CoverGrid CoverGrid looks real nice, but is sharply focused on browsing covers. It's explicitly "not to be a replacement for your favorite MPD client but an addition to get a better album-experience", so probably not good enough for a daily driver. I asked for a FlatHub package so it could be tested.

mpdevil mpdevil is a nice little client. It supports:

• repeat, shuffle, single, consume mode
• playlist support (although it fails to load any of my playlist with a UnicodeDecodeError)
• nice genre / artist / album cover based browser
• fails to load "all artists" (or takes too long to (pre-?)load covers?)
• keyboard shortcuts
• no file browser

Overall pretty good, but performance issues with large collections, and needs a cleanly tagged collection (which is not my case).

QUIMUP QUIMUP looks like a simple client, C++, Qt, and mouse-based. No Flatpak, not tested.

SkyMPC SkyMPC is similar. Ruby, Qt, documentation in Japanese. No Flatpak, not tested.

Xfmpc Xfmpc is the XFCE client. Minimalist, doesn't seem to have all the features I need. No Flatpak, not tested.

Ymuse Ymuse is another promising client. It has trouble loading all my artists or albums (and that's without album covers), but it eventually does. It does have a Files browser which saves it... It's noticeably slower than gmpc but does the job. Cover support is spotty: it sometimes shows up in notifications but not the player, which is odd. I'm missing a "this track information" thing. It seems to support playlists okay. I'm missing an album cover browser as well. Overall seems like the most promising. Written in Golang. It crashed on a library update. There is an ITP in Debian.

Conclusion For now, I guess that ymuse is the most promising client, even though it's still lacking some features and performance is suffering compared to gmpc. I'll keep updating this page as I find more information about the projects. I do not intend to package anything yet, and will wait a while to see if a clear winner emerges.

• Secure Boot is required (Windows 10 would still boot on a machine without Secure Boot, although buying hardware without at least support for that hasn't been possible for several years now)
• A v2.0 TPM module (Windows 10 didn't need any TPM)
• A modern enough processor.

A modern enough processor If your processor isn't modern enough to run Windows 11, then you can probably forget about it (unless you want to use qemu JIT compilation -- I dunno, probably not going to work, and also not worth it if it were). If it is, all you need is the "host-passthrough" setting in libvirt, which I've been using for a long time now. Since my laptop is less than two months old, that's not a problem for me.

A TPM 2.0 module My Windows 10 VM did not have a TPM configured, because it wasn't needed. Luckily, a quick web search told me that enabling that is not hard. All you need to do is:

• Install the swtpm and swtpm-tools packages
• Adding the TPM module, by adding the following XML snippet to your VM configuration:

  <devices>
    <tpm model='tpm-tis'>
      <backend type='emulator' version='2.0'/>
    </tpm>
  </devices>
  

  Alternatively, if you prefer the graphical interface, click on the "Add hardware" button in the VM properties, choose the TPM, set it to Emulated, model TIS, and set its version to 2.0.

You're done! Well, with this part, anyway. Read on.

Secure boot Here is where it gets interesting. My Windows 10 VM was old enough that it was configured for the older i440fx chipset. This one is limited to PCI and IDE, unlike the more modern q35 chipset (which supports PCIe and SATA, and does not support IDE nor SATA in IDE mode). There is a UEFI/Secure Boot-capable BIOS for qemu, but it apparently requires the q35 chipset, Fun fact (which I found out the hard way): Windows stores where its boot partition is somewhere. If you change the hard drive controller from an IDE one to a SATA one, you will get a BSOD at startup. In order to fix that, you need a recovery drive. To create the virtual USB disk, go to the VM properties, click "Add hardware", choose "Storage", choose the USB bus, and then under "Advanced options", select the "Removable" option, so it shows up as a USB stick in the VM. Note: this takes a while to do (took about an hour on my system), and your virtual USB drive needs to be 16G or larger (I used the libvirt default of 20G). There is no possibility, using the buttons in the virt-manager GUI, to convert the machine from i440fx to q35. However, that doesn't mean it's not possible to do so. I found that the easiest way is to use the direct XML editing capabilities in the virt-manager interface; if you edit the XML in an editor it will produce error messages if something doesn't look right and tell you to go and fix it, whereas the virt-manager GUI will actually fix things itself in some cases (and will produce helpful error messages if not). What I did was:

• Take backups of everything. No, really. If you fuck up, you'll have to start from scratch. I'm not responsible if you do.
• Go to the Edit->Preferences option in the VM manager, then on the "General" tab, choose "Enable XML editing"
• Open the Windows VM properties, and in the "Overview" section, go to the "XML" tab.
• Change the value of the machine attribute of the domain.os.type element, so that it says pc-q35-7.0.
• Search for the domain.devices.controller element that has pci in its type attribute and pci-root in its model one, and set the model attribute to pcie-root instead.
• Find all domain.devices.disk.target elements, setting their dev=hdX to dev=sdX, and bus="ide" to bus="sata"
• Find the USB controller (domain.devices.controller with type="usb", and set its model to qemu-xhci. You may also want to add ports="15" if you didn't have that yet.
• Perhaps also add a few PCIe root ports:

  <controller type="pci" index="1" model="pcie-root-port"/>
  <controller type="pci" index="2" model="pcie-root-port"/>
  <controller type="pci" index="3" model="pcie-root-port"/>
  

I figured out most of this by starting the process for creating a new VM, on the last page of the wizard that pops up selecting the "Modify configuration before installation" option, going to the "XML" tab on the "Overview" section of the new window that shows up, and then comparing that against what my current VM had. Also, it took me a while to get this right, so I might have forgotten something. If virt-manager gives you an error when you hit the Apply button, compare notes against the VM that you're in the process of creating, and copy/paste things from there to the old VM to make the errors go away. As long as you don't remove configuration that is critical for things to start, this shouldn't break matters permanently (but hey, use your backups if you do break -- you have backups, right?) OK, cool, so now we have a Windows VM that is... unable to boot. Remember what I said about Windows storing where the controller is? Yeah, there you go. Boot from the virtual USB disk that you created above, and select the "Fix the boot" option in the menu. That will fix it. Ha ha, only kidding. Of course it doesn't. I honestly can't tell you everything that I fiddled with, but I think the bit that eventually fixed it was where I chose "safe mode", which caused the system to do a hickup, a regular reboot, and then suddenly everything was working again. Meh. Don't throw the virtual USB disk away yet, you'll still need it. Anyway, once you have it booting again, you will now have a machine that theoretically supports Secure Boot, but you're still running off an MBR partition. I found a procedure on how to convert things from MBR to GPT that was written almost 10 years ago, but surprisingly it still works, except for the bit where the procedure suggests you use diskmgmt.msc (for one thing, that was renamed; and for another, it can't touch the partition table of the system disk either). The last step in that procedure says to restart your computer!, which is fine, except at this point you obviously need to switch over to the TianoCore firmware, otherwise you're trying to read a UEFI boot configuration on a system that only supports MBR booting, which obviously won't work. In order to do that, you need to add a loader element to the domain.os element of your libvirt configuration:

<loader readonly="yes" type="pflash">/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE_4M.ms.fd</loader>

When you do this, you'll note that virt-manager automatically adds an nvram element. That's fine, let it. I figured this out by looking at the documentation for enabling Secure Boot in a VM on the Debian wiki, and using the same trick as for how to switch chipsets that I explained above. Okay, yay, so now secure boot is enabled, and we can install Windows 11! All good? Well, almost. I found that once I enabled secure boot, my display reverted to a 1024x768 screen. This turned out to be because I was using older unsigned drivers, and since we're using Secure Boot, that's no longer allowed, which means Windows reverts to the default VGA driver, and that only supports the 1024x768 resolution. Yeah, I know. The solution is to download the virtio-win ISO from one of the links in the virtio-win github project, connecting it to the VM, going to Device manager, selecting the display controller, clicking on the "Update driver" button, telling the system that you have the driver on your computer, browsing to the CD-ROM drive, clicking the "include subdirectories" option, and then tell Windows to do its thing. While there, it might be good to do the same thing for unrecognized devices in the device manager, if any. So, all I have to do next is to get used to the completely different user interface of Windows 11. Sigh. Oh, and to rename the "w10" VM to "w11", or some such. Maybe.