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It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#431

Post by mixmastamyk »

cromka wrote: post #214
mixmastamyk wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a buggy program. Zswap has been available for quite a while.

>You have a buggy program. As in memory leak? No. > Zswap has been available for quite a while. Zsawp is not Zram, which is a distant relative of the macOS on-the-fly compression I was talking about. Zram is buggy and still advised against regular use ( https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1i3mdrw/comment... , https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-... ). Zsawp itself is enabled by defaul…

zswap works well in my experience. Don't need both. Combined with systemd-oomd I haven't had a swapping or memory issue in many years. 16gb here with VMs and lots going on. This doc clears some things up:

https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#432

Post by nl »

sheepscreek wrote: post #352
joe_mamba wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I was seduced by Apple Silicon after experiencing the exceptional battery life and performance. DHH showed the Framework laptops with latest Intel Panther Lake SoCs having similar battery life to AS Macs (~14 hours) under Omarchy linux while gaming benchmarks put their iGPUs in line or better than AMD's Ryzne SoCs at gaming. The era of long battery life being the USP feature exclusive to Macbooks is slowly going awa…

The (memory) chip shortage saga is not going away for a few years. Most fabs are going to be capacity starved. Apple will happily pony up billions to TSMC to set up a new plant in exchange for exclusive capacity. No other laptop manufacturer can do this. This will put them in an even more advantageous position. In all honesty, the Neo couldn’t have arrived at a better time for them.

TSMC doesn't do memory.

AMD actually got access to TSMC 2nm before Apple: https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-4-14-amd...

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#433

Post by mixmastamyk »

gt0 wrote: post #411

The Framework 12 look lovely, I like the design a lot, but like other Framework computers, it's just far too expensive for what it is. The processor inside it is approaching 4 years old and wasn't a good processor at launch. I like how it looks, but I won't spend that much money on so little computer.

I remember when Apple computers were shipping four year old CPUs not long ago... was a couple of the Pro workstations? Times have changed.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#434

Post by sgjohnson »

benoau wrote: post #101

As nice as Apple's hardware is it's all undermined by who they are as a company, intentionally limiting their devices more and more while they relentlessly argue in courts and to regulators that we owe them more and more for using our devices. Rosetta 2's retirement announcement was when I realized I won't buy another Mac, I'm not interested in a computer that is preoccupied with stopping me from running software. Wo…

> Rosetta 2's retirement announcement was when I realized I won't buy another Mac, I'm not interested in a computer that is preoccupied with stopping me from running software.

This is the 3rd time this has happened in roughly 2 decades by the way.

ppc/ppc64 -> x86_64 x86_64 -> x64 only x64 -> arm64

I much prefer Apple just forcing the developers to update their apps. Perhaps it’s just me though.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#435

Post by regexorcist »

taude wrote: post #279
tobinfricke wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it feasible to run Linux on the Apple hardware? Seems like that could meet your requirements, except possibly "align with my values." I saw https://asahilinux.org/ but don't know how usable it is, or whether the long battery life and hardware support is preserved.

i've tried getting linux to run on a 2018 MB Pro (intel/nvidia based). Even after a ton of research and installing a couple "compatible-ish" distros, I couldn't get it to work, and gave up. And then further reading suggested I was always going to live with a semi-bricked machine. I just wanted a simple writing and couch surfing laptop. But the version of MacOs running on that old hardware is so slugish, it's painful.

A Fedora live USB should just boot on an Intel MBP (maybe you have to hold Alt? Don't remember). Then you can install it to disk. I was happily running Linux on a 2015 model until recently, still a good machine for most things.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#436

Post by altcognito »

thefossguy69 wrote: post #424
commandersaki wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny it’s the opposite for me. What if I want to switch between desktops of multiple users; easy with fast user switching, not really a thing in Linux (yeah I’m sure it can be hacked up, but bleh).

The biggest papercut preventing me from being productive on macOS is it's horrible window management which cannot be traversed with keyboard shortcuts like one does in WMs like bspwm and others on Linux and that absolutely insane ~500 ms delay in setting the focused window when moving between virtual desktops. For some reason, Apple's ideal desktop experience is tailored around focusing on one application at a time.…

It is bizarro. With multi monitor sometimes I click windows and things don’t show. Dragging when more than one dialog is open is unpredictable. The corners are huge, even when maximized. Even the vaunted application bar is so weird - and windows is trying to copy it! Why can’t we use the entire bottom of the screen? Apps don’t show there anyway! You can’t get rid of it and replace it with something else? Just not allowed.

Stretch an app across two monitors? Not with that config! Display port? Oh no! Scaling cleanly? Never heard of it.

Seriously bad stuff. I’ve thought about writing a book with everything wrong with it. It’s bonkers.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#437

Post by makeitdouble »

simondotau wrote: post #410
makeitdouble wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you get a really good base model. Why does it matter to _you_ in particular that the base model is good ? For a decade buying macs I never got the base model, I switched to the Asus ROG series and a Surface Pro, and again I'mm not on the base model of either. I get that MacBooks are very good volume purchases and excellent value for those right in the target, but IMHO that's not the people writing in this thread. I…

Base model used to mean glorified toy with severely compromised fundamentals. The Macbook Neo is not that. It is an excellent screen, excellent keyboard, and excellent silicon, encased in an excellent chassis. As a remote work terminal / casual computing system, the compromises are IMHO almost entirely psychological.

> glorified toy

> remote work terminal / casual computing

I'm having a hard time grasping the difference

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#438

Post by majormajor »

thefossguy69 wrote: post #424
commandersaki wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny it’s the opposite for me. What if I want to switch between desktops of multiple users; easy with fast user switching, not really a thing in Linux (yeah I’m sure it can be hacked up, but bleh).

The biggest papercut preventing me from being productive on macOS is it's horrible window management which cannot be traversed with keyboard shortcuts like one does in WMs like bspwm and others on Linux and that absolutely insane ~500 ms delay in setting the focused window when moving between virtual desktops. For some reason, Apple's ideal desktop experience is tailored around focusing on one application at a time.…

> For some reason, Apple's ideal desktop experience is tailored around focusing on one application at a time. Which is certainly true for some workflows, but that's not me.

This is a very weird-sounding take to someone who has used Macs for three decades and recalls that for most of that time they never even had a full-screen mode.

Apple's desktop experience DNA is still, for better or worse, deeply anchored to spatial arrangement of partially-overlapping windows (or non-overlapping, if screen is big enough and window small enough), driven by mouse (Expose hot corners back in 2004 were basically the end-game after which they haven't made any new significant changes to this, and haven't had to). Their full-screen/single-app modes are IMO a weird half-baked Windows-maximize alternative.

But yes, it's a very mouse-oriented, single-desktop spatially-organized-and-layered world.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#439

Post by duskwuff »

MBCook wrote: post #409
duskwuff wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They had the classic environment. They could have kept that going. Not for long. The Classic environment depended on the system having a PowerPC CPU - it would not have run on Intel systems. (Rosetta translation would not have been applicable.)

I know it didn’t last long. But why do you say Rosetta wouldn’t have worked?

For essentially the same reason that Rosetta 2 can't be used to run Windows - they're userspace JIT translators, not system-level emulators. The Classic Environment was, for all intents and purposes, an entire virtualized PowerPC system running Mac OS 9, and allowed software running inside it to do some pretty wild things like patching system "trap" routines, writing graphics directly to the framebuffer, or even setting breakpoints in and handling exceptions from other applications.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#440

Post by veqq »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #379
LarsDu88 wrote: post #70

What Framework is trying to do feels like something that would've made more sense 10 years ago. And the reason for that is b/c of Moore's Law approaching its end. The way to manufacture more efficient compute now is do things like put DRAM closer to the chip and even closer integration between CPU and GPU. The fact that Apple can co-design their silicon such that the CPU and GPU can pull from the same pooled RAM is a…

> The way to manufacture more efficient compute now is do things like put DRAM closer to the chip and even closer integration between CPU and GPU. The fact that Apple can co-design their silicon such that the CPU and GPU can pull from the same pooled RAM is a major advantage over competitors. > When you have CPU, GPU, and even DRAM sitting on the same "die Apple has been really successful convincing people they've do…

Indeed, on an HP Elitebook with a Ryzen 8840U I get about 20 hours of battery life on CachyOS (but downclocking a bit, with TLP) and the speed tests claim this is like a M2-3. For like $500 (before RAM went up...)
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