tl;dr Unzip it into the /opt/ directory.

I want to install Filezilla - so I can SFTP files around. Sadly, the Flatpak version is unmaintained and the version in apt is out of date. Luckily, you can download the zipped version.

Their Wiki helpfully says:

If you have special needs, don't have sufficient rights to install programs or don't like installers, the zip version is there for you. A zip-file is a file that contains files inside of it. They are packed into one file and you need to unpack (unzip) them to use them.

But it doesn't say where!

The answer is the /opt/ directory.

Run this command:

sudo tar -xJf FileZilla_*_x86_64-linux-gnu.tar.xz -C /opt

The first time you may need to adjust the directory permissions:

cd /opt/
sudo chown -R root:root FileZilla*

After installing, FileZilla will periodically check for updates. It will download them to the ~/Downloads/ directory. Run the above command to install the new version.

If you want to be able to launch Filezilla from your dashboard, or to pin it to your dock, you'll need to create:

/usr/share/applications/Filezilla.desktop

Place this text in it:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Filezilla
Comment=FTP
Exec=/opt/FileZilla3/bin/filezilla
Icon=/opt/FileZilla3/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/filezilla.svg
Type=Application
StartupWMClass=filezilla
Categories=Game;

What a faff!

I splashed out on the larger Framework 16. Again, I only bought one stick of RAM (32GB) so I can buy more when the price falls. Similarly, I only got a modest 500GB SSD, and I didn't bother with a super-premium CPU or extra graphics card. Total cost with all the gubbin was close to £1,700.

So here's a quick review: it's really good.

OK, here's a slightly longer review:

Set Up

The setup guide is beautifully designed. It has text and video to show you exactly how things work. All the screws are numbered, and are tackled in order. They all use the same (supplied) torx screwdriver. Oh, and the main body screws are attached, so they won't go flying.

Removing the case, fitting the bits, and putting it back together was a breeze.

The BIOS / UEFI is an ugly pig of an interface. No worse than any other laptop, but really detracts from the quality of the product.

There was a BIOS update which was easy enough to apply - unzip it onto a USB drive, shove it in, wait.

Installing Pop_OS Linux was simple - although you do need to disable "Secure Boot" in the UEFI.

Everything worked without needing to futz about. WiFi, sound, keyboard back light, Bluetooth, camera. Once I installed fprint I was able to use the fingerprint reader to log in!

I got 4 USB-C expansion ports and, reluctantly, two USB-A for legacy devices. I didn't bother with HDMI or Ethernet - I have USB-C hubs. To the future! The expansion ports slide in easily and can be locked in place. They are annoyingly small though.

Usage and tweaking

The screen supports 165Hz. That's bonkers. Yes, it does look gorgeous, but it probably eats battery life. So I set it back down to 60Hz.

The screen is beautifully tall - with a 16:10 aspect ratio. The resolution is 2560x1600 which, again, is probably too good! Everything looks crisp and gorgeous - but tiny. I used Wayland's fractional scaling and set it to 150%, I also boosted some of the fonts.

Sound is strong - for a laptop. Bass was just enough to feel it in my legs, voices were clear, there was no obvious clipping or distortion. But, it is only a laptop. It isn't going to drown out the neighbours or deafen you.

The trackpad is geneously large and very responsive. It worked with multi-finger gestures and has a pleasing click to it.

Keyboard

The en-GB keyboard and numpad are great - but they're a different layout to my old one which makes my tired old brain a little confused. I don't get why insert / del share a key.

Other oddities:

• There's no right context menu key:
• The backlight is only a single colour (white) and only has 4 levels of brightness including off.
• The numpad backlight is not controlled by the keyboard
• There's a keyboard information site but no easy way to remap keys.

On the plus side:

• The dedicated calculator key is nice.
• The function keys have controls for media playback, volume, brightness etc.
• Impressively, both Function Lock and NumLock remember their state between reboots. Sadly there's no indicator light on them.

Battery Life

Fine. Looks like 5-8 hours of moderate use. To be honest, I spend most of my time near a USB-C power source. The UEFI has an option to set a maximum charge for the battery, so I set it to 75%. That's a good balance between usable battery life and preserving its longevity.

Suspend seemed to work and wasn't too heavy on the battery overnight. It runs cool - I haven't heard the fans spin up yet. That said, I'm not running loads of 3D games or recompiling my kernel.

Niggles

There's a significant gap between the touchpad and the chassis when it is clicked.

After reassembling, there is a slight but noticeable lip between the trackpad unit and the spacer units.

The BIOS update seemed to take longer than the OS installation! Seriously annoying having to watch it transcribe each bit via the pony express. It doesn't stop when finished, so you'll need to keep an eye on it otherwise it goes through it again.

The hardware switches for the camera and microphone feel fragile. Because they're slightly stiff, I'm always worried I'll damage the screen when I use them.

The microphone is ridiculously sensitive. I had to set it to the lowest level otherwise it would pick up sounds from other rooms and made me sound a bit boomy.

Here's an audio test of it.

The setup guide didn't mention the tape which needs removing from the thermal pads - I only found out about it by reading the comments.

The expansion ports seem like a good idea, but they are ridiculously small. There's just about enough space to fit an HDMI socket and a smidgen of circuitry.

Personally, I'd have liked them to be even longer to allow some more complicated expansion ideas. I think I'm going to struggle to design an NFC reader for them.

WiFi

The 5GHz WiFi seems slow. I can hit 250Mbps on the Framework. Another laptop in the same position hit over 300Mbps. I've also noticed it drop out once or twice. I don't know if that's the hardware, software, or firmware.

Obviously, that's plenty fast for most day-to-day operations, but it is a bit weird that it is noticeably slower than other machines.

WebCam

1080p @ 30fps. Excellent quality. The hardware switch disables it. I usually prefer a physical cover - but the switch does the trick. Here's a quick recording.

More than good enough for endless video calling. The tallness of the screen is an advantage here - it puts it much closer to your eye-line.

Final thoughts

I've only been using this for a few days, but it is a dream. Screen is big and bright. Keyboard is responsive. Sound is decent. The community are friendly.

The total cost of the laptop and accessories was £1,700. That's a fair whack of cash! But I wanted to support a new way of building and designing laptops. In the few days that I've been using it the performance has been excellent and build quality is solid.

Is it a lightweight and svelte powerhouse like the M3 MacBook Air? No - but it isn't designed to be. I'm hoping this machine will last me into the 2030s with significant upgrades along the way.

If you have any questions - please drop a comment in the box. And if you have any laptop stickers, send them my way - it is looking a little bare!

If I close the lid, it keeps running. This is unhelpful.

If I manually run the suspend command - systemctl suspend - the laptop blanks the screen then immediately turns it back on at the lock screen. It doesn't suspend.

I know that suspend physically works - becasue running any of these other command does properly suspend the machine. But powering it back up goes straight to the desktop - no lock screen!

• sudo /lib/systemd/systemd-sleep suspend
• sudo echo "mem" > /sys/power/state
• sudo acpitool -s

The Fix

I found what was causing suspend to fail by running:

• sudo systemd-analyze verify systemd-suspend.service

That spat out any errors in the suspend service. Highlighted in red was:

systemd-suspend.service: Failed to create systemd-suspend.service/start: Unit nvidia-resume.service is masked.

That was odd, because I don't have an Nvidia graphics card.

Looking in the relevant directory:

cd /etc/systemd/system/systemd-suspend.service.requires

I found:

nvidia-resume.service -> /lib/systemd/system/nvidia-resume.service
nvidia-suspend.service -> /lib/systemd/system/nvidia-suspend.service

I deleted the nvidia-resume.service and nvidia-suspend.service files.

For good measure, I also checked what Nvidia stuff I had installed:

• apt list --installed | grep -i nvidia

I used sudo apt purge to remove the remnants of any Nvidia stuff. Probably installed by mistake.

After that, suspend worked fine.

What "Fixes" Didn't Work

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole, following lots of suggestions from various people on the Internet. None of these helped me - but they may be useful pointers to you.

I tried disabling everything in /proc/acpi/wakeup. I couldn't get PXSX to be disabled. But even with everything else off, the suspend didn't work.

Killing Bluetooth with rfkill block bluetooth didn't work. Nor did disabling WiFi.

I have an updated Kernel 6.8.0. I'm not sure of the ramifications of swapping to an older one.

Running sudo kernelstub -a mem_sleep_default=deep and then rebooting didn't make a difference.

Switching from Wayland to X11 didn't fix it. Nor did unplugging the laptop from power. No external peripherals or screens were connected.

The whole system - including Flatpaks and Snaps - was updated.

This shell script works. But there's no way to tie it in to having the power button pressed or the lid closed.

Once done, type into the Firefox address bar about:support and check that "Window Protocol" is set to "wayland".

You can configure how swipes work by visiting about:config and filtering for "swipe":

I'll say this for Linux - why have two different ways to accomplish something when you can have twenty? It seems there are dozens of different places where you can set environment variables - I've seen tutorials recommend editing ~/.profile, /etc/profile, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.config/environment.d/ and more.

On Pop_OS (an excellent Ubuntu / Debian derivative) but the only way I could find to reliably set environment variables was ~/.bash.rc

I hope a Linux nerd will be along shortly to mansplain to me why this is The Most Logical Way™.

But a recent upgrade gave me a problem. I started the app and the windows were missing their borders and my mouse cursor was too small.

Not show-stopping problems, but mildly annoying. After a bit of faffing around, I discovered the cause and how to fix it.

I was running the Flatpak version of Calibre. Normally I find Flatpaks work really well, but it seems that this particular one had an issue with the Wayland display system used by Pop OS and other modern Linux distros.

The fix was pretty easy. I installed Flatseal which is an app to manage the settings of Flatpaks. Then I told Calibre that it shouldn't use Wayland and should instead fallback to the older X11 display.

And, with that, everything looked as it should again:

I think Wayland is a pretty snazzy bit of software, but it's new so there are going to be teething problems. Luckily, this was a fairly straightforward fix.

What is this 🧙‍♀️ craft?

In your keyboard settings, you should see an option like this:

You can set the "Compose" key to be anything you like. Personally, I use the otherwise-useless Scroll Lock button.

Now, once you press ScrLck you'll see this symbol .

The next few letters you type will be "absorbed" by that symbol and combined to make something new.

What's available

You can see the default symbols in /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose

You can add your own, either in the file or in ~/.XCompose

Note!

The short-cuts you type are case-sensitive. Typing ScrLck, f, u does nothing, but typing ScrLck, F, U will get you 🖕!

Alternatives

There is a menu driven way of selecting emoji if you can't remember keyboard shortcuts.

Credit

I've shameless stolen this tip from:

Claudia Pellegrino @claudi@darmstadt.social

@c_pellegrino

I love #Linux so much!
Typing Compose+p,o,o gives you: 💩
Typing Compose+F,U gives you:🖕
I’m absolutely not making this up. It’s in the Compose map that comes with X11. (Works in the terminal but not in the browser)

---

Although, I've found that it does work in the browser on Wayland 🤷

🖖

For some reason, I never considered doing that on Linux - until now!

Clipboard Indicator is a handy little Gnome extension. It sits on your dock monitoring your clipboard. Click the icon and get a list of what you've copied.

They're keyboard and mouse selectable, and you can set some to be permanently remembered.

There's a brief settings screen, but I found the defaults were suitable.

Security and Privacy

Having things like passwords in your clipboard history could be a security risk. I recommend using BitWarden as a browser extension to auto-fill passwords without using the clipboard.

Similarly, someone with access to your machine could look through your history.

The code is open source if you want to audit it.

Turns out, Gnome has a hidden screen recorder! To activate it, press these keys simultaneously. CTRL+ALT+SHIFT ⇪+R

A small circle icon will appear in your tray to show it is recording. By default, the recordings last 30 seconds, and are saved as a WebM in the ~/Videos directory.

If you want to stop the screen recording, just hit the same keys again.

Limitations

This is basic. I mean really basic. It records the whole screen. There is no way to get it to only record a specific window. If you have multiple monitors, it records everything spanned across them.

It doesn't record sound, so you'll need to add commentary later if that's what you're after.

There is no GUI to configure it. If you want to change the recording length, run this command in your terminal

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys max-screencast-length 90

That sets the length to 90 seconds. Set it to 0 to have no limit.

There is a tiny amount of documentation available.

What Else?

If you know of a better screen recording tool - which works with Wayland - and won't take me ages to learn, I'd love to hear about it.

Here's my problem. When I move a window from one screen to another, the window changes size.

It contains the same number of pixels, but it has different physical dimensions. Here's one window, stretched across all three screens:

As you can see, the blue bar is a different thickness on each screen.

I can change the relative vertical placement of each monitor fairly easily. So I can line up the top of each screen, but that doesn't help with the sizing.

What I want, is something like this screenshot from SuperPaper Wallpaper manager.

That app correctly detects the physical dimensions of my screens and displays them correctly. How can I get Ubuntu / Pop OS / Wayland to do the same?

I'm using a modern Wayland display server. To enable Fractional Scaling, I run:

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"

And then reboot. Then I get these options per display.

That's great - but intervals of 25% just aren't fine grained enough from me. And, because my external screens are larger than my internal screens, I need them to have a smaller scaling factor. Assuming my laptop is 100%, I need one monitor to be 90% and the other to be 66%.

There's a Gnome bug open since 2017 - but no fix yet.

I could set my laptop's screen to be 150% and the other screens to be 100% and 125% - but that makes everything on my main screen far too large.

Ideally, I'd like to tell Linux the physical dimensions of my monitors, and their placement, then let it work out the fine detail. But I'll settle for some command line fiddling.

To be clear, this isn't a problem with HiDPI - all my screens are less than 4K.

If you have a suggestion for how to independently underscale individual displays using Wayland - I'd love to know!

Possible objections

• It'll look blurry
  • Maybe, but the myth of the pixel grid is something I've explained before. But my eyesight isn't amazing. I just want consistency.
• Not every component can scale
  • The modern Linux operating system mostly uses SVG for icons, and fonts are designed to scale. So I don't see why that would be the case.
• It'll spike your CPU / GPU
  • I'm always tethered to power when I'm using multiple monitors. And I'm mostly not running computationally intensive apps.
• Stop being so obsessive
  • Fair!

Fonts

First, from the console, install Gnome Tweaks

sudo apt install gnome-tweaks

Run Tweaks and select "Fonts". You can swap fonts, boost them, and generally have a good fiddle. Increasing the scaling factor is a good way to boost the size of all desktop elements.

Bluetooth - rename

By default the Bluetooth name is pop_os.

sudo nano /etc/hostname

Replace it with whatever you like.

Keyboard Lights

You will need to use Tuxedo. It's a bit complicated.

git clone https://github.com/tuxedocomputers/tuxedo-keyboard.git
cd tuxedo-keyboard
git checkout release

Now edit the Makefile. Find the lines with

# Package version and name from dkms.conf
VER := $(shell sed -n 's/^PACKAGE_VERSION=\([^\n]*\)/\1/p' dkms.conf)
MODULE_NAME := $(shell sed -n 's/^PACKAGE_NAME=\([^\n]*\)/\1/p' dkms.conf)

Change dkms.conf to the full path of your git download. For example

# Package version and name from dkms.conf
VER := $(shell sed -n 's/^PACKAGE_VERSION=\([^\n]*\)/\1/p' /home/MYNAME/git/tuxedo-keyboard/dkms.conf)
MODULE_NAME := $(shell sed -n 's/^PACKAGE_NAME=\([^\n]*\)/\1/p' /home/MYNAME/git/tuxedo-keyboard/dkms.conf)

Save the file. Now run:

make clean
sudo make dkmsinstall
sudo modprobe tuxedo_keyboard

Testing! Press the Fn key and the numpad symbols

• [Fn] / changes the colours. You get red, green, blue, yellow, purple, light blue, white, off
• [Fn] * toggles the lights on and off
• [Fn] - dims the lights
• [Fn] + increases brightness

You can also install this widget to help manage things.

Screen Tearing

See Fix screen tearing on rotated external monitors (Ubuntu / POP!_OS)

Edit this file:

sudo nano /etc/gdm3/custom.conf

Find this line:

WaylandEnable=false

Change it to:

#WaylandEnable=false

Reboot.

On Pop!_OS, there is this settings cog in the bottom right corner. (Different login screens may have it elsewhere).

Choose "Pop on Wayland". Or "Wayland" - depending on your Desktop Environment.

That's it! No tearing when scrolling or playing videos! If you've changed your screen scaling, you might have to fiddle with it to get back to normal - but everything should just work.