January 16, 2025 8:18 PM
Thoughts on my Framework laptop
I wasn't planning on making this blog post today. I was actually in the middle of writing a different blog post when my laptop froze on me. It's been doing this a lot lately. The screen will freeze and the only way I can get it to un-freeze is if I put the computer to sleep by closing the lid. Now this would tend to happen when I was viewing a really intensive website, like a food blog. Or LinkedIn. I also started seeing a lot issues when I had Steam running. Yesterday, I had Steam open and it was completely unresponsive to any mouse clicks. I couldn't even hit the X in the corner to close the window. But for the most part working on my blogs was fine!
Until it wasn't. At this point, the only thing that hasn't caused my computer to freeze is Stardew Valley.
So I got this computer in spring of 2022. My old chromebook (which was still running perfectly) no longer had supported updates, so I figured it was time to find a new laptop. I guess I chose a Framework because it seemed like a good company, and it looked cool to put together, and I liked that I could easily replace parts of it (I haven't replaced a single part yet).
I ended up getting a
- Framework 13
- with an 11th Gen Intel Core i7 processor
- with 16 gigs of RAM
- and 500 gigs of space
- and I installed Ubuntu on it
People have asked me if I like the laptop. Before I hit all the screen freezing issues, it was fine. I feel like I don't use it to its full potential. The battery life is not great. I can't ever put this laptop to sleep for extended periods of time with it unplugged. I always have to fully power off. The lid opens to a much larger angle than any other laptop I've ever used, and I don't know of any reason why that's useful.
Sometimes I think, why did I choose this laptop? Why did I choose Linux? I don't understand how any of this works! I had to google how to update Discord so many times before it stuck in my memory.
But here I was, with this laptop that was freezing a lot. And I know enough that if your electronic thing is having issues, you should see if it's up to date. It turns out that I was on version 3.07 of the BIOS, and the latest is 3.20. That's so old that I can't even update it to the latest version at once. And before I could even do that, I had to be cautious and back up all the important things on this laptop, so I ended up putting this off for several months.
And I probably would have kept putting it off even longer, but if I can't even reliably write a blog post, then things are pretty dire. So today was the day. I made sure to back up whatever important things I thought I had on this computer, and then I went through the process of finding a flash drive, reformatting it, getting version 3.17 on it, booting it up, then downloading version 3.20 on it, and booting that up. And once I was done that, I figured I would upgrade to the latest LTS version of Ubuntu. This all took a few hours or so, but it was actually really easy!
So after I finally got my stuff up to date, I went to start up a sandbox for my blog, and then I got this error
ListUtil.c: loadable library and perl binaries are mismatched (got handshake key 0xdb00080, needed 0xdb80080)
😱
I did a bunch of googling and trying things from Stack Overflow, but nothing seemed to be working. One person suggested using a certain perl module to copy over existing installed perl modules to a new folder. I was sitting on the couch trying that out, and I was watching the text scroll by as it re-installed a bunch of modules, and then next thing you know, I'm asleep with my laptop on my lap.
I woke up in a very confused state, and when I woke up the laptop, I saw all the perl module installation output and I decided that I needed to shut down the laptop and deal with this another time. I walked over to a local meetup space and talked to some people for a couple of hours, which was nice. I think that little break was good for my brain, because when I got home, I realized that I just needed to clear out the local/ folder in my repos and re-install all the perl modules using carton.
So here I am, writing this blog post, and so far, the screen has not frozen yet. But it's only been hours, so 🤞