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Open-Sourcing our Firmware

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Re: Open-Sourcing our Firmware

#91

Post by bo1024 »

rnk wrote: post #53
smasher164 wrote: post #41

I've been running NixOS on my Framework for the last few months, and I've been really happy with it. I initially got it so I'd have viable hardware to do osdev on, so learning that they are going to open-source its firmware makes me even more happy.

Seems too good to be true. Reasonable prices, upgradable, no soldered ram. So has it been a reliable Linux laptop, what's the battery life with your options?

You nailed it, battery is the only downside I’ve had, not awful but probably say 3 hours of video playback, or 5-6 hours of web use. Haven’t used it unplugged all that much so very rough guesses. Bigger problem with my fedora install at least is battery draining while the lid is closed.

Overall great machine

Edit: I may be missing software updates that improve this, no idea

Re: Open-Sourcing our Firmware

#92

Post by wmf »

trulyme wrote: post #87
wmf wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For BIOS/UEFI a lot of hardware vendors outsource their firmware to AMI and AMI keeps everything proprietary so they can keep charging money. (Coreboot is not an option for real computers because it doesn't have menus and various other things.)

I would assume that building an UI with menus and whatnot is the easy part of it? (not an expert, genuinly curious)

It may be that writing the code is the easy part but caring enough to actually start on it is the hard part. There's been no visible progress on this... ever.

Re: Open-Sourcing our Firmware

#93

Post by sydney6 »

dheera wrote: post #57
rnk wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems too good to be true. Reasonable prices, upgradable, no soldered ram. So has it been a reliable Linux laptop, what's the battery life with your options?

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.

I can imagine that the power draw in S3 could come from having (replacable) DDR Memory instead of (mostly soldered) LP-DDR Memory.

edit: typo.

Re: Open-Sourcing our Firmware

#94

Post by kmorgh »

brightball wrote: post #49
galgalesh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, just use flags and confuse the fuck out of multilingual countries. Belgium has Dutch, German and French as official languages. So what would a Belgian flag mean? What flag should I choose? If I choose the flag from the Netherlands to get Dutch, I'll probably be confused by a whole bunch of terminology since the dutch of different countries differs vastly more than the English from different countries. "People w…

If Dutch, German and French were supported languages on the site I imagine that flags of the Netherlands, Germany and France would be representing the language selection. As a US citizen I often visit sites that use a British flag to represent English. I don’t bristle because there’s not a US flag or question whether the US flag should also be referencing Spanish. It’s just a detail to draw your eye that otherwise ho…

Except Belgian "Dutch" is called Flemish. And is different enough from the other Dutch to warrant its own i18n.

Belgium is an exceptional case but I'm sure you can find more.

Re: Open-Sourcing our Firmware

#95

Post by 3np »

Beltalowda wrote: post #12
ignaloidas wrote: post #4

Side note: the language selection is stupid on the website. No, I'm not from Germany, and I don't speak German even if it's the closest country to me that you sell laptops in. Also, it's a bad practice to associate flags with languages. Or to give options that don't work after you select them. Otherwise, very nice news!

They don't have a language selector, they have a region selector which sets the appropriate currency, VAT (presumably), and also language, yes. It's an entirely appropriate usage of flags.

It is not. I can be present in Germany and want my laptop delivered there. That does not mean I speak a word of German.

Language and physical location are disjoint. Even worse when I know the original content is in English, my preferred language, but someone decides I only deserve the partial translation.

Re: Open-Sourcing our Firmware

#96

Post by TallonRain »

smasher164 wrote: post #41

I've been running NixOS on my Framework for the last few months, and I've been really happy with it. I initially got it so I'd have viable hardware to do osdev on, so learning that they are going to open-source its firmware makes me even more happy.

I'm curious what the build quality is like. I've heard some complaints about QA and reliability issues with the hardware, but I don't know anyone in person who owns one of these devices. What has your experience been like?

Re: Open-Sourcing our Firmware

#97

Post by amelius »

kingcharles wrote: post #6
ignaloidas wrote: post #4

Side note: the language selection is stupid on the website. No, I'm not from Germany, and I don't speak German even if it's the closest country to me that you sell laptops in. Also, it's a bad practice to associate flags with languages. Or to give options that don't work after you select them. Otherwise, very nice news!

I agree that flag != language (British Union flag for English being a prime example), but what is the next best alternative?

> what is the next best alternative?

This:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30028593

Re: Open-Sourcing our Firmware

#98

Post by uoaei »

darrenf wrote: post #89
uoaei wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've had two-letter designations for languages for a long time now.

Two letters in the Latin alphabet, I assume - does that assist those who primarily read Cyrillic, Greek, Vietnamese, Arabic, Thai, Tamil, … ? Localisation basically never has a simple “we should just…” solution.

I'm sure if Mandarin were the default language, English speakers would quickly learn to recognize the character for "English" and be able to find/click it on a webpage without too much hassle.

Language comprehension is unnecessary when all you need to do is recognize a character.

Re: Open-Sourcing our Firmware

#99

Post by sneak »

rnk wrote: post #53
smasher164 wrote: post #41

I've been running NixOS on my Framework for the last few months, and I've been really happy with it. I initially got it so I'd have viable hardware to do osdev on, so learning that they are going to open-source its firmware makes me even more happy.

Seems too good to be true. Reasonable prices, upgradable, no soldered ram. So has it been a reliable Linux laptop, what's the battery life with your options?

The screen is very low-res and the GPU is weak. This is why I don't have one.

If you don't care about pixels (seems common in PC-land), this is probably a good thing re: power consumption.

I look at text all day, every day, and want it to be high res. It's been high res on my Macs for half a decade, and my XPS is even better. I'll get one of these once they fix the screen.

Re: Open-Sourcing our Firmware

#100

Post by lillecarl »

_zooted wrote: post #86
rnk wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems too good to be true. Reasonable prices, upgradable, no soldered ram. So has it been a reliable Linux laptop, what's the battery life with your options?

Having come from elementaryOS I can say that Fedora 35 is awesome. So much better!

Having come from Debian, Ubuntu, and Manjaro I settled on what feels like the last distro I will use on my own systems: NixOS. It's not so much better, it's so much different.

Every(ish) single package, every single line of configuration(ish) is under version control in a(couple) nix files. I share (most) of it between my systems. With flakes (and it's lockfile) it's a 100%(ish) deterministic system.

Downside: The language is arcane to me and the tooling is dogshit. Not that I could've made it any better, but running my config repo through entre to rebuild on every write to get some promiscuous error nobody has had before sucks major D.

Therefore I still have an Ubuntu container (because every desktop application targets Ubuntu) running with X11 forwarding for the few packages that aren't in nixpkgs that I wanna run.

I also don't use home-manager, but chezmoi for my dotfiles. Since I want my home configuration to work on MacOS and other distros I might SSH.

Atomic upgrades and downgrades are such a great feature I don't know how people can live without it now that I've experienced it.

Note: The default configuration NixOS gives you is also shit, out of the box they don't ship a system like you'd want to consume it (nixos-generate-config). An anecdotal example is that Avahi isn't installed by default, which means chromecasting won't work until you figure out that you need Avahi, i18n config is shit too.

So it's not all green grass, but definitely worth it, since every Nix line you write is an investment into making your experience better "forever" (I don't see NixOS going away anytime soon, very healthy activity on the project).

Now after praising NixOS for awhile, let's praise the developers of all packages that are compiled into the lovely distros you all use. For me the KDE team can't get enough praise, the software is so damn good.

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