As a fan of gaming on the go—whether that be handhelds or yearning for the good old days when my ancient gaming laptop actually worked—I can tell you that the spectre of ‘low battery’ haunts me. So when modular laptop aficionados Framework announced the Framework 13 Pro earlier this week, touting both its battery life and gaming performance, I was cautiously optimistic.
The hardware team hasn’t yet had the pleasure of going hands-on with what’s pitched as a “MacBook Pro for Linux users,” but the early word on the street is glowing. Red Hat engineer GloriousEggRoll shared on X that Framework sent them a unit to test, and that he’s “Happy to report Nobara runs beautifully on it, and Kernel 7 runs great.”
You might be familiar with that name if you’re already into Linux gaming or use a Steam Deck, because that’s the same GloriousEggRoll of Proton GE fame. For those who don’t know, Proton GE often helps Steam games run better and more smoothly on Linux than they do using the default Proton versions.
Basically, this is the developer of the most popular unofficial Proton build for gamers, and he’s also made the gaming-oriented distro Nobara Linux. In other words, when it comes to gaming on Linux, GloriousEggRoll knows his stuff.
When asked by another X user if he liked it enough to make it his main laptop, the engineer replies that he “already did.” For Linux gamers, that’s high praise indeed.
This isn’t the only satisfied Linux user to date. The official X account for CachyOS, an Arch-based Linux distro, also praised the Framework 13 Pro laptop. Besides highlighting the machine’s build quality, they also write that “battery life has been the biggest surprise.”
GloriousEggRoll also praised the machine’s “freakishly good battery life,” but CachyOS goes on to make an astounding claim. The official account shares, “On CachyOS, after some extra tuning with Intel-LPMD, we’ve been getting around two days of normal work out of it—mostly programming, chatting, browser use, and terminal work. That’s honestly incredible.”
‘Incredible’ is the word if these assessments are correct, though again I should reiterate that the Framework Pro 13’s gaming endurance remains to be tested by us on the hardware team.
CachyOS shares that its own hardware humans “now reach for this over [the] MacBook Air for mobile work,” before going on to conclude, “for the first time it really feels like Framework has combined its repairability and upgradeability with a properly premium experience.”
