Going to be an interesting thread to follow as someone who wants a Framework for the repairability. And friends recommending it; and honestly in a world where social media is probably flooded with astroturfed comments instead of real experience, and review sites are ones I highly doubt actually touched or bothered with the products, I am gonna trust word of mouth. But I can be convinced into reconsidering (price, performance I can get out of a laptop, and the Hyperland/Omarchy thing).
my general consideration points for purchasing
General points
Typing this from a MacBook as someone who likes the look and thinness of it a lot, and appreciates the “boring gray color scheme” because neutrals will always go with my outfit.
I see the interchangeable ports as a bonus.
Any of them, including the weakest possible take-home configuration for the 12, would be a performance upgrade over my current Linux laptop (HP laptop I got for around $249ish).
I particularly like the upgradeable storage.
Would be buying DIY and loading some Linux distro on it.
Model-specific
12 inch would be great for me if it were not for the color accuracy and me wanting to use it to do a bit of digital art that involves color. And Linux not supporting the sheet music reader I like. Or having any sheet music reader at all as far as I am aware—dedicated sheet music readers as opposed to just PDF readers tend to have nice features like letting you jump back to a specific page without needing to go in and edit the whole PDF file, and setting up setlists of sheet music you can quickly and easily flick through. But being able to totally replace my iPad and my current Linux laptop would be so nice. Putting one foot out of the Apple ecosystem for principles and “what if they start making more changes I don’t like and I’m stuck,” and consolidating two devices into one.
13 inch is better on accuracy but loses the stylus support, so no more art, and having a stylus is really helpful on sheet music annotation for me. Would handle my games better too. Although I don’t really play things requiring great performance, never play multiplayer requiring high ping or kernel-level anticheat, and I have pretty good tolerance for low frames per second, I do have a feeling 12 inch would fail to handle anything but the most super lightweight games.
16 inch is a total nonstarter. Too big. I like portability.
I would highly recommend the Framework 13. I’ve had it for a bit more than a year now. The only problem I’ve faced was that the WiFi card was a bit unstable in EndeavourOS. But that was fixed by replacing wpa_supplicant with iwd. (I hear that it was only an issue for the AMD version, and that it’s fixed now.) Battery life is fine for me. I limit charging at 70%, and that usually lasts me the whole day.
I love how Linux friendly it is. On my last laptop (an HP), it was pretty much impossible to upgrade the BIOS from inside Linux. Now it’s trivial. There’s also good support available when you face issues. (Both from Framework, and community members.) The hardware is pretty nice. I actually like how it’s MacBook-like, because it just looks nice in most settings. It’s portable too, I really hope they don’t make it bulkier like some folks here seem to demand.
The problem is that for whatever reason, touch panels (specifically the ones with built in digitizers) always have awful color accuracy. Every single panel that I’ve looked at to replace the one in my laptop is always like 66% sRGB. Also taking into consideration that it does both MPP and USI styluses, that digitizer is custom.
Edit: it’s not a built in digitizer, it’s glass. They’re sourcing the panel from boe based on the parts image. Theoretically if you knew what you were doing, you could replace the digitizer. I’ve tried removing the glass from a panel before and it is a nightmare.
Edit 2: there’s 3 panels that fit the descriptor of what you want and fit the framework 12 (not accounting for the glass digitizer). They’re all discontinued and are like a decade old according to panelook.
Edit 3: I adjusted my search parameters to match the framework 12. It’s a 12.2 in panel and according to panelook, all of them barring the discontinued one are 50% ntsc gamut or don’t list anything. It’s such an odd size that not many display manufacturers have options. Like 6 options, 6 different manufacturers.
Convertible laptops like this just suck in general to shop for. I wanted one with a dgpu and that left me with 3 current gen options, (11th gen Intel when I originally searched), all from Asus, or 7th-8th gen Intel (including the machine I had at the time).
Going to be an interesting thread to follow as someone who wants a Framework for the repairability. And friends recommending it; and honestly in a world where social media is probably flooded with astroturfed comments instead of real experience, and review sites are ones I highly doubt actually touched or bothered with the products, I am gonna trust word of mouth. But I can be convinced into reconsidering (price, performance I can get out of a laptop, and the Hyperland/Omarchy thing).
my general consideration points for purchasing
General points
Model-specific
I would highly recommend the Framework 13. I’ve had it for a bit more than a year now. The only problem I’ve faced was that the WiFi card was a bit unstable in EndeavourOS. But that was fixed by replacing
wpa_supplicantwithiwd. (I hear that it was only an issue for the AMD version, and that it’s fixed now.) Battery life is fine for me. I limit charging at 70%, and that usually lasts me the whole day.I love how Linux friendly it is. On my last laptop (an HP), it was pretty much impossible to upgrade the BIOS from inside Linux. Now it’s trivial. There’s also good support available when you face issues. (Both from Framework, and community members.) The hardware is pretty nice. I actually like how it’s MacBook-like, because it just looks nice in most settings. It’s portable too, I really hope they don’t make it bulkier like some folks here seem to demand.
The problem is that for whatever reason, touch panels (specifically the ones with built in digitizers) always have awful color accuracy. Every single panel that I’ve looked at to replace the one in my laptop is always like 66% sRGB. Also taking into consideration that it does both MPP and USI styluses, that digitizer is custom.
Edit: it’s not a built in digitizer, it’s glass. They’re sourcing the panel from boe based on the parts image. Theoretically if you knew what you were doing, you could replace the digitizer. I’ve tried removing the glass from a panel before and it is a nightmare.
Edit 2: there’s 3 panels that fit the descriptor of what you want and fit the framework 12 (not accounting for the glass digitizer). They’re all discontinued and are like a decade old according to panelook.
Edit 3: I adjusted my search parameters to match the framework 12. It’s a 12.2 in panel and according to panelook, all of them barring the discontinued one are 50% ntsc gamut or don’t list anything. It’s such an odd size that not many display manufacturers have options. Like 6 options, 6 different manufacturers.
Convertible laptops like this just suck in general to shop for. I wanted one with a dgpu and that left me with 3 current gen options, (11th gen Intel when I originally searched), all from Asus, or 7th-8th gen Intel (including the machine I had at the time).
Hey, thank you so much for helping me! Now I have a better idea of my options and what wants are viable and which are not.