New Laptop: Framework 13

-Ben

I’m typing this on my new Framework Laptop 13 in the park because it’s the first 80 degree day we’ve had this year. The screen is remarkably bright and it’s standing up okay to the wind.

I’ve had a Lenovo X1 Extreme for ~six years now. It’s been a great machine, but I decided to upgrade. In the past 6 years, I was able to plan my wedding with LibreOffice. I’ve become much, much more comfortable with Linux. A 16 inch laptop was getting wieldy, so I’ve been looking for something smaller. Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 in October. All of those things were reasons to look at new laptops. But the only requirement in there is smaller, with a strong preference for Linux support.

I ended with a Framework because of their excellent Linux support, great size screen, and most importantly: their philosophy that you should be able to fix and upgrade your computer without buying an entirely new one. I’ve read some articles and had heard good things. They announced new main boards recently, selling their old AMD Ryzen chips at a discount. The price was much cheaper for a DIY version than many competitors. And I look forward to changing and upgrading my computer in the future.

I went with a bottom of the line AMD Ryzen chip, but spec’d it out with a 4TB hard drive and 48GB of DDR5 RAM. I opted for the nicer screen in thought of scaling 200% in Ubuntu and got plenty of expansion cards to take full advantage of them. A clear keyboard makes it a bit of a head turner, but otherwise nothing about this computer shouts “I can fix this!”, it just blends in with the landscape. I have hopes of upgrading the main board in a year or so, and even then this computer will be cheaper for the specs than most of the competitors I looked at.

Overall, my first impressions have been amazing. It took me ~20 minutes to put the hardware together, even after reading all their docs twice. The installation of Ubuntu was a breeze, and their guide helped me feel even more confident. Everything has just worked and I’ve gotten all my typical tools installed: LibreOffice, Bitwarden, Brave, mise, git, eza, fzf, neovim… You get the idea. Some from the App Center, some from the terminal and everything has worked flawlessly. I’m getting to try out ULauncher and Sway (not at the same time) and podman. Basically, getting the laptop setup was a nonevent. In less than an hour of time, I was doing everything I wanted on it.