As part of my redudancy I needed rethink my computer setup at home. For the longest time I have used my work laptop as mine. It fits with the blur of work and personal life. Although I did run Ubuntu on the Dell XPS 13 and had pretty much complete admin control to it.
Ultimately I needed to give it back and wipe it clean using Dban of course, meaning I needed to pick a personal laptop. As Dell has dropped the XPS 13 range, now was a good time to switch to Framework.
There has been a few times when I considered one. Once when my laptop bag strap broke as I was crossing the road and squashed the cornder. It didn’t smash the screen or damage the USB C port luckily. Anyway I clearly remember a conversation with Cory Doctorow who I was hosting for his new book at the time, he showed me how cheap and easy it was to replace the audiojack, USB C’s and just being able to replace every aspect of it.
I was pretty much sold but it wasn’t till about a 18 months later when the reality set in that I should actually buy one. I did a ton of research and asked peoples views including Andy Piper and found the only disadvantage is advance configurations and the firmware doesn’t get updated as quickly as other laptops. Nothing major.
With that I opted for the Framework 13 DIY Edition (Intel Core Ultra Series 1). I bought the most amount of memory (1x 32gig DIMM) and storage (4tb) my budget would take on Amazon then put it all together. It wasn’t difficult but I was very careful as I didn’t want to cause any problems for myself. I’d say it was easier than building PCs in the past but more fiddly.
I choose Intel, mainly because I had problems with AMD and Linux in the past. Maybe this was a legacy mistake but its done now.
Once it was put togther, I installed Ubuntu on it giving the silly amount of storage I have 100gig of swap (mainly for when I do get another 32gig Dimm)
Its been a few days and honestly its a great machine.I have had problems mainly with Ubuntu and moving things between the Dell and Framwork. Ubuntu defaulted to Wayland and Unity cruff. I couldn’t get Appimages to work and moving mainly to Flatpaks required a lot of permission tweaking.
The laptop its self is good but large compared to the XPS 13, it only just fits into my laptop bag. The keys are taller than what I’m use to but the trackpad feels great. I think Ideally I would have a black graphine body rather than the silver. It reminds me of the Mac books.
Weirdly the fan does come on sometimes (like old mac books) and its a bit noisy but I’ll get to the bottom of it in time.
I really like the expansion ports which there are 4 of. I thought the audio jack was also on an expansion port but its built in. The screen suporised me as I have very good eye sight and opted for the 2.5k screen with a max resolution of 2880px x 1920px at 120hz! I have mine set to 60hz to save on battery. Talking of which its been great at about 8-9 hours with the battary limited to 80% in the bios. To be fair replacing the battery isn’t a problem with the Framework laptop, when it gets low after lots of use.
This is a good buy and glad I went this route, although maybe I bought too soon… the 12 inch looks good but would I replace my Raspberry Pi 5 desktop for the desktop framework unlikely.