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a friend just told me about Framework laptops and it seems like a compelling philosophy of laptop design: it's modular and user-serviceable, and indeed they ship it to you in bits with a screwdriver šŸ˜…

Curious if anyone here has had any experience with them. Some reports on the internet that they have fan noise / temperature troubles?

in reply to Ben Millwood

I think with these things I often worry that I'm letting the philosophy / aesthetics of the purchase get in the way of the practicality

on the other hand, look I can get a programmable LED matrix embedded in it frame.work/gb/en/products/16-lā€¦

in reply to Ben Millwood

I've used them; they seem roughly on par with an 80th percentile laptop PC, physically/aesthetically. Definitely not as nice as a MacBook or Razer laptop, but similar to a nicer Dell.

Compared to other ideology-driven laptops I've used (System76, Purism), they're much much much nicer.

in reply to Ben Millwood

They're popular enough among hacker-types that typical linux compat issues seem to be mostly ironed out (suspend/resume, graphics, wifi, etc.).

The main reason I'm not using one is because I want a silicon root of trust that can attest to the integrity of the whole effective TCB of the platform, and only their chromebook variant has a plausible story of even attempting to (TPMs don't normally cover the embedded controller firmware), but last I checked the chromebook variants has pretty limited max specs (not enough ram for comfortably compartmentalizing desktop workloads into VMs with the desired granularity). This is understandable, since chromebooks are thought to be a low-end market segment, but still unfortunate.

in reply to Ben Millwood

I bought a Framework several months ago and I love it. I installed Debian. I was also worried about whether there were practical downsides, but to me the problems have been indistinguishable from the other laptops I've used.
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