←back to thread

The new and upgraded Framework Laptop

(community.frame.work)
1680 points etbusch | 3 comments | 19 May 22 12:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.704s | source
Show context
doyougnu ◴[19 May 22 17:07 UTC] No.31437263[source]▶
I recently bought a framework laptop for a daily driver when I'm not on my desktop. For context I was running NixOS on an old 2014 macbook air, and I work on the glasgow haskell compiler in my day job so I do a lot of CPU heavy tasks.

I've got to say, as long as these things are being produced I'll never go back. They are just too good and I cannot recommend them highly enough. One of the things that didn't occur to me before I bought it was that _because_ of the modular design I can switch the side the power port is on. That may not seem like much but it was a revelation the first time I sat on the couch and thought "huh I really wish this was over on that side....wait a minute!".

I've also had absolutely no problems with NixOS on my machine, even my apple earbuds easily connect via bluetooth, something that I never quite got working on my macbook.

10/10 This is damn close to my dream laptop and I'm excited a new version is on the way.

replies(16): >>31437287 #>>31437337 #>>31437716 #>>31437892 #>>31438110 #>>31438737 #>>31439099 #>>31439412 #>>31440128 #>>31440447 #>>31440557 #>>31441497 #>>31445239 #>>31447230 #>>31458294 #>>31465000 #
fiddlerwoaroof ◴[19 May 22 19:36 UTC] No.31439099[source]▶
This is interesting: over the last several months, a friend has been running NixOS on a Framework and has been told by Framework employees that they can’t help him with Linux kernel issues because he’s using an unsupported OS and he’s also had lots of complaints about battery life and power management.

I love the idea of the Framework, but it seems to suffer from all the issues that made me switch to MacBooks in the first place.

replies(4): >>31439419 #>>31440130 #>>31441178 #>>31443963 #
nrp ◴[19 May 22 21:02 UTC] No.31440130[source]▶
We would love to be able to provide more personalized service for different Linux distros, but we unfortunately just don't have the necessary expertise to be able to do that well.

For Linux-related service requests, we first ask that folks try an Ubuntu 22.04 or Fedora 36 Live USB (the distros we have done the most internal testing with and created setup guides for) to be able to determine whether there could be a hardware issue. Once we have verified there isn't a hardware issue, we ask that folks post in the community thread for their distro for help: https://community.frame.work/c/framework-laptop/linux/91

In practice, this works well because we have an extremely helpful and engaged community (including in many cases maintainers for that distro). Additionally, because that debugging happens in the open, any answers from it are publicly visible for future users to see.

All of that said, we'd love to find better ways to provide deeper support ourselves and are open to input. A more official path would likely still start with the most popular distros.

replies(3): >>31440562 #>>31441853 #>>31443176 #
1. carlhjerpe ◴[19 May 22 21:44 UTC] No.31440562[source]▶
You know, not to promote NixOS too much but the reproducibility of it makes this specific OS especially easy to support. There's already a community driven hardware support module to use [1]. If you look at it it doesn't hold a lot of things though, since NixOS is quite bleeding edge (Wi-Fi already supported) and you Framework is otherwise quite Linux friendly (Please make a 1080p-ish display tho, until Wayland is 4 real).

LPT: NixOS installs by themselves aren't good for much, use NixOS-hardware and look into power configurations if you have specific requirements.

1: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/blob/master/framewor...

replies(1): >>31441930 #
2. doyougnu ◴[20 May 22 00:22 UTC] No.31441930[source]▶
Yea and the best part was that installing NixOS was dead easy. I followed Graham Christensen's instructions[1] and had nix create a personalized image with the latest linux kernel and some other stuff. Then I just flashed and booted from that image after partitioning. Honestly it was dead simple and its so hard to go back to the ad-hoc system config style a la Arch linux and other distros.

I'm probably a lost cause now because I think I'm going to convert my entire raspberry pi cluster to NixOS from ubuntu.

[1]: https://grahamc.com/blog/nixos-on-framework

replies(1): >>31448244 #
3. carlhjerpe ◴[20 May 22 14:50 UTC] No.31448244[source]▶
I'm daily driving NixOS both at home and work, but to be honest I don't really use the Nix features all that much, I just have a system that's predictable.

Every now and then I spin up an OS container w/ Ubuntu or the likes, forward X if I'm doing something that isn't supported in NixOS yet.