Computers

Framework Laptop 13 review: a Linux laptop that sleeps properly

Close the lid, open it two days later, still 91 percent. That used to be a fantasy.

By Wendell Ochoa · August 6, 2026

I closed the lid of the Framework Laptop 13 on a Friday afternoon at 96 percent, drove to Shelburne Falls, did not touch it all weekend, and opened it Sunday night at 91 percent. Fifty-one hours, five points. It woke in a second and a half with every window where I left it.

People who have only ever used a laptop that works will not understand why that is the first paragraph. Anyone who has carried a Linux laptop for the last decade will. The usual experience is a hot bag, a dead battery and a lecture from someone on a forum about how you configured it wrong.

The suspend numbers

I ran the lid test six times over three weeks on Fedora, which is one of the two distributions Framework supports directly. The drain came out between 0.08 and 0.14 percent an hour, and the worst run was the one where I had left an external drive plugged in. Call it a point of battery every eight hours in the bag. A week in a drawer would cost about twenty.

I did not configure anything to get it. I installed the operating system from a stick and closed the lid. Three years ago that would have cost me an evening of kernel parameters.

Awake, the battery lasts 8 hours and 5 minutes on the loop the Gazette uses for laptops: screen at 140 nits, forty minutes of writing, fifteen minutes of browsing, ten minutes on a video call, over and over until it dies. Writing all day with the wireless off, I saw 9 hours and 40 minutes once. Compiling a large project pulled it down to 3 hours and 15 minutes.

That is a good day of work and it is not a great number. The battery in here is 61 watt-hours, which is small for a 13-inch laptop in 2026, and a MacBook Air beat it by more than four hours on the same loop. I bought the Framework anyway, for reasons in the next two sections.

The ports are cards

There are four bays, two on each side, and you slide a card into each one. USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, DisplayPort, ethernet, a card reader, and a couple of storage cards that add a drive to the side of your laptop. They cost between about $9 and $39 apiece and they come out with a latch and a fingernail.

This sounds like a gimmick until the Tuesday you need HDMI in a lecture hall and put HDMI in the laptop instead of hunting for a dongle. I run USB-C on both sides, USB-A on the back left and HDMI on the back right, and the HDMI comes out for the card reader when I am working with photos.

Two honest problems. The cards are small enough to lose, and I have already misplaced the ethernet one. And a full set costs real money on top of the laptop, so budget $60 or $70 if you want every port covered.

Repairs, and why this is the whole point

Ten Phillips screws, all captive, so none of them fall on the floor. The screwdriver comes in the box. Inside there are two ordinary memory slots, an ordinary M.2 drive slot, and QR codes on the parts that take you to the guide for replacing that exact part.

Framework runs a parts store where the screen, the keyboard, the battery, the hinges and the mainboard are all listed with prices. The display kit is $199. The keyboard is under $100. That is the difference between a laptop that gets fixed at four years old and a laptop that goes in a bin.

The mainboard is the interesting part. When the chip in here is slow in 2030, you buy a new mainboard, put it in this same chassis with this same screen and keyboard, and the old board still runs as a small computer hanging off a monitor. I have not done that yet, obviously. I am telling you the path exists and that the parts are on sale to anyone, which is more than the rest of this price range will say.

Keyboard and trackpad

Here is where I stop cheering. The keyboard has about 1.5 millimeters of travel and a soft, slightly vague bottom, and it is the weakest thing on the laptop. It is fine. I wrote this review on it. A ThinkPad keyboard is better and it is not close, and if you type eight hours a day you will feel that.

Typing it is quiet. I measured 41 dB from two feet away at my normal speed, about the same as tapping a table.

The trackpad is 4.5 inches wide, smaller than what everyone else ships now, and it clicks with a real hinge rather than a haptic buzz. Two-finger scrolling and three-finger swiping worked from the first boot. Palm rejection was right except when I rested the base of my right hand hard on the corner, which stopped happening once my hands learned the machine.

The speakers are thin. They are for a video call and a kitchen podcast, and anything else wants headphones.

What took a config file

The fingerprint reader logged me in and did nothing for the administrator prompt that appears when you install software, so I was typing my password anyway. Fixing that meant two lines in a file in the authentication directory, and those lines are on half a dozen support pages. A person who has never edited a file as root would be stuck there, and that is a Linux problem rather than a Framework one.

The ambient light sensor was the other one. The screen brightness crept up and down on its own in a room with a window, which drove me up the wall. I turned it off by writing a value to a system file and making the change stick at boot. Ten minutes, and I would rather have had a checkbox.

The screen, and the price

A 13.5-inch matte panel in the tall 3 by 2 shape, 380 nits on my meter. The extra height is worth about four more lines of text than a widescreen laptop gives you, and you notice it every day. I worked on a picnic table outside the Hadley library at noon in July and could read it at 80 percent brightness. There is a sharper, faster panel option for more money. I would skip it and keep the battery.

The laptop is 2.9 pounds and 0.62 inches thick. I bought the DIY Edition, which arrives in pieces, takes about twenty minutes to put together with the included screwdriver, and lets you supply your own memory and drive. With 16 GB, a 1 TB drive and four expansion cards, mine came to $1,180.

That is a lot for these specifications. A Zenbook with the same chip class is $300 less. You are paying for the screws.

Who should skip it

Anyone who wants a laptop for games or heavy 3D work. The graphics here are integrated and adequate for video calls and light photo editing.

Anyone who wants the longest battery in the store, because that is the MacBook Air and it is not particularly close.

And anyone who needs a touchscreen, because the 13 does not come with one.

Everyone else is buying a $1,180 laptop that will still be worth opening in 2033. Emmett Sarkis at Valley Tech Exchange in Amherst looked at the parts store on his phone, looked at the ten captive screws, and said he would rather sell me the screwdriver and go do something harder.