I've been using a Framework laptop for a month on Ubuntu 21.10 and pretty happy with it. Some hiccups but mostly answered by digging through forums.
Battery life in operation is excellent, but it does drain 30% in 8 hours when on suspend which is a bit much. Not a dealbreaker but hope this can be solved.
High battery drain during standby on Linux can be due to the system not entering the proper sleep state. I had this happen to me on an AMD machine lately, in that case disabling secure boot solved the issue.
Here is a pretty detailed blog post in checking if that is the problem and how to deal with it on intel systems
Out of my element here, but would be curious to see if this is something solvable in firmware (now open-sourced!) or if it's a hardware problem to begin with (power states? etc).
Edit: Also curious if this issue is generally a hardware or firmware issue in most laptops, or if it's a mix of both.
Could be caused by Modern Standby (by default newer laptops remain on even when nominally off, which has been known to cause issues). Some more details here:
The problem is that current Intel laptops don't use S3 anymore, they use S0ix a.k.a. "modern standby", an abomination where the CPU doesn't really sleep and the battery drains fast.
I have a Thinkpad X1 from 2018 and by default it came with S0ix enabled and Lenovo later on added the S3 sleep state option through a BIOS update, called "Linux compatibility something".. Before that, one had to manually edit the DSD table to get rid of this evil burning-sleeping-laptop-in-backpack-feature called S0ix.
Does the Framework Laptop, or other popular models from the other manfacturers you mentioned, not have a S3 sleep state option these days, i.e. S0ix only?
S0ix has stronger requirements on the "correct" interaction between firmware/BIOS and OS, it offloads more work to the OS. Poorly implemented S0ix will drain the battery faster, but correctly implemented S0ix is as good as S3 or even better.
Lenovo put out a buggy S3 implementation on some systems that hasn't been tested well because it's only an optional "Linux suspend" setting. Drains twice as fast as Linux with correctly implemented S0ix. And the worst thing is, nobody except Lenovo do can fix it because it's all on the BIOS level, and their China-based firmware team has other priorities.
Well-implemented S3 is nice. But it's going to disappear. Both Intel and AMD are switching away with full force, vendors won't have S3 options in the BIOS going forward and the ones that remain will likely suck. On the other hand, S0ix support is coming together even on AMD platforms which were a little late to the party. Once it's working decently, I'd rather trust my OS than my laptop manufacturer's firmware team to suspend components correctly.
Battery life in operation is excellent, but it does drain 30% in 8 hours when on suspend which is a bit much. Not a dealbreaker but hope this can be solved.