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Linux on the Framework Laptop

frame.work

181–190 of 267 posts

Re: Linux on the Framework Laptop

#181

I'm all for more choice and competition in this industry, and more pressure on manufacturers to reign in consumer-hostile practices. However, I'm not sure that I get this. At the end of the day, we're talking about an MBP-lookalike that runs Windows and has non-soldered RAM. And kinda-sorta gives you an option to run Linux without paying the Windows tax, but only if you're willing to assemble from a kit. That's... no…

I'll keeo buying leasing return thinkpads until someone gets trackpoints in the program. I'm a programmer. A glorified typist that refuses the 'pad' . Speed, nice. dpi also. But the thinkpad pointer and keys are necessary.

Re: Linux on the Framework Laptop

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes 'funding the change you want to see' is merely to appease your own conscience; some real problems are systemic or caused by other actors. Turning a 1 L/min sink off for the 20 seconds of washing your hands doesn't matter when the farmer down the road is growing row crops in a desert with center-pivot irrigation system. But other times, like this? It's absolutely a valid approach. If a high-profile open lapt…

1 L/min is 1 L/min, and it's not a great sacrifice to turn off a faucet when you don't need it. So even if the farmer is not judiciously using water, it doesn't mean you shouldn't.

I wasn't suggesting people shouldn't make that particular 'sacrifice', I suppose the analogy could be better. My point was that individual action may be neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent the bad outcome from happening: agriculture could cause aquifer depletion even if suburban houses used no water at all, while without agricultural use, suburban houses could be incredibly wasteful and the aquifer might be fine.

In this case, the 'bad outcome' is crummy thin-and-light disposable laptops with insufficient numbers of obsolete ports, proprietary drivers, bad thermals, and closed operating systems, and no options for power users who want good laptops. It has felt to me, for a long time, that Apple, Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. have been pressing further in this direction. My 'boycott' of these products is not heard in any of their boardrooms or design committees; the strategy of buying business' discontinued Thinkpads on eBay works for now but does not work long-term.

A successful Framework laptop might make some waves. Somewhere in some conference room, someone will float the proposal that their new mobile workstation should obviously save $0.25 per unit by gluing in the battery, this would be a data point to say that some people who might be making decisions like this would actually like a laptop that includes a screwdriver.

Re: Linux on the Framework Laptop

#183

Anyone knows if this is something that will be sold in EU? I could import it, but that would be quite expensive. :(

Related to that, it seems quite bad UX that I had to go through the configurator, and create an account, before I found out that they only ship to the US.

In full size mode (desktop) there is a visible selector for the country, but I just assume this was language selector.

Re: Linux on the Framework Laptop

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't see this succeeding when the laptop I have to assemble myself costs more than a prebuilt laptop with much better specs. I mean, if all that mattered were specs, we would all be running desktops at full desktop-class TDP. Or laptops made out of cheap bendy plastic with the latest CPUs. Ergonomics matter, build quality matters, and for some the ability to adapt and upgrade is also part of the spec.

> I mean, if all that mattered were specs, we would all be running desktops at full desktop-class TDP. As someone doing just that (I do 99% of my work on my desktop machine), to this day I don't understand folks doing heavy development work on a laptop. If you need portability, remote into a desktop class machine. Sure there are times when you just can't (airplane, or camping in the middle of nowhere, etc) but those…

Those times are less rare than you'd think. I've been in plenty of situations where I've needed to develop something in an environment with sketchy/nonexistent network access. Not to mention that even in ideal conditions you're now maintaining two separate machines instead of one, and not to mention that if you're doing all your development over VNC or RDP or something you're now introducing some rather annoying latency between your fingers and your eyes.

Having done development work by remoting into another machine (specifically, RDPing into a "dev" server to use vendor-specific IDEs/tooling), I can't say it was an even remotely pleasant experience. I would've sooner preferred doing that work directly on my own machine, or at the very least in a VM if a specific OS and configuration is necessary.

Re: Linux on the Framework Laptop

#185
post #122

I love how the storage expansion cards are easily replaceable by the user: https://frame.work/blog/storage-expansion-cards Sadly it looks like the boot drive cannot be replaced in this manner. Many years ago I had a Compaq laptop with swappable boot drive. So one day you can boot Windows and the next day you can boot Linux. Without any external drives. (No messing with dual boot -- you replace the hard drive complete…

You can actually boot Linux off of the Storage Expansion Cards (I do it regularly with Fedora 34 and Ubuntu 21.04). You can't easily do that with Windows 10, but you can put Windows 10 on the internal SSD and Linux on the Expansion Card to achieve what you're describing.

How's performance relative to an internal drive? Historically when I've tried that it was kinda painful (there's a reason why "live" Linux distros used a ramdisk even after the advent of USB drives), but that was back before USB Type-C was a thing, so maybe that's fast enough that it'd at least be on par with a traditional HDD?

Re: Linux on the Framework Laptop

#186
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should take a look at Ahmdal's law. "Every little bit helps" type thinking is a detriment to the fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always. This is a rule of optimisation that can be extended for most other things.

Ahmdal's law lets you calculate the theoretical speedup of a job given how parallelize-able it is. I don't see how that is applicable here. If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument. But to say that people _shouldn't_ conserve resources just because they aren't the largest…

> If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument.

I mean.. that doesn't seem very far off from the truth?

Re: Linux on the Framework Laptop

#189

I really, really really wish they had an AMD option. I don't really _need_ a laptop currently, but that would probably push me over. If they had that and a supported eGPU configuration (or even an option with better graphics) I would probably retire my desktop.

Almost the same boat here, as long as I could still push 144hz on both of my displays.
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