Using Fedora on a Framework Laptop

I recently switched to a Framework laptop. They suggest Fedora as their linux distro, so I decided to give it a try despite being a long-time Debian user. This post aims to document some of the issues I had and how to solve them.

Official guideline

The framework team has amazing support. Their documentation just worked out of the box.

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Fedora+38+Installation+on+the+Framework+Laptop+13/165

The only small change I added was the tap-buttom-map configuration in Gnome to something sensible:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-button-map "lmr"

Installing i3

I’ve also been using i3 wm for a long time. This worked pretty well, specially if you are not resource constrained and can run it on top of Gnome (e.g. using gnome flashback).

This time it didn’t work for me, since the new Gnome settings work on Wayland and i3 is not compatible with it.

Installing sway

Fortunatelly, there is a drop-in replacement: Sway. It also happens to be that Fedora supports an official spin with it.

I re-installed Fedora using the Sway spin and it almost worked out of the box.

Small problems

Note: In order to update the config, you can copy the default config (/etc/sway/config) to ~/.config/sway/config and edit it there.

1. Scaling

For some reason the default scaling is set to 2.0, which is too much. To solve it you need to get the name of your display by doing:

swaymsg -t get_outputs

You will see the name of the output (e.g. “DP-3”) and the current scaling factor.

Then you can update the scaling to a reasonable value in the sway config:

output eDP-1 scale 1.25

2. Missing fonts

Some of the icons were broken, I installed fontawesome sudo dnf install fontawesome-fonts which fixed most of the issues. For the other icons I went to the waybar configuration and changed them.

3. Touchpad

It was not working by default. The solution was very similar to the scaling issue. First ran swaymsg -t get_inputs, look the name of the touchpad and then add a new entry to the sway config:

input "<ID from prev command>_Touchpad"  {
      tap enabled
      tap_button_map lmr
}

Thoughts

Overall I’m very happy with Fedora + Sway spin. It is easy to configure and it works well with the Framework hardware.