Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop

Honestly if you actually need high end specs then you should just build a PC.

"16 core Zen 5 CPU, 40 core RDNA 3.5 GPU. 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM @ 256 GB/s + stunning OLED" - Easily done as a pc build.

In a world where you can get this laptop with Linux, there's a new set of trade-offs -

- be prepared for a LOT of things not working because the size of the market for extremely expensive configurations with high end CPU + GPU + RAM + Monitor + Linux is practically zero.

- when closing the lid and walking to the coffee shop will the battery be dead before you finish your coffee? probably

- will a new GPU/GPU architecture be a headache for the first X years...yes, and if you want to replace every 2 years, I guess you will have a permanent headache.

- will updating graphics drivers be a problem? yes

- is the text in your "stunning oled" going to be rendered correctly in linux? probably not

- will the wifi chip work in linux? maybe

- will all the ports work/behave? probably not

- will your machine perform worse than a high end PC that cost 1/2 as much from 3 years ago... yes.

I think the point of him making his own laptop is that he would fix all those software problems.

Is his build even possible today in a laptop?

In a desktop, you would need a top of the line threadripper for that 256GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Consumer grade Zen 5 desktops reach only about 80GB/s in real world testing, with a theoretical max of slightly over 100GB/s.

AMD Strix Halo (a consumer mobile processor) has theoretical support for 256GB/s of memory bandwidth (quad-channel, 8000 MT/s LPDDR5X, must be soldered, supports 128GB at most).

The memory is shared for the GPU, so you should probably compare with desktop GPU, so 1-2TB/s.

> - when closing the lid and walking to the coffee shop will the battery be dead before you finish your coffee? probably

Why probably? Going to sleep on lid close is common enough, it's even the default in all OSes/DEs. If you turn off sleep-on-close and drain the battery, that's on you.

> - is the text in your "stunning oled" going to be rendered correctly in linux? probably not

> - will the wifi chip work in linux? maybe

> - will all the ports work/behave? probably not

These seem like odd things to doubt, when Framework has a perfectly working system for Linux and has been doing it for years. No hardware in their systems is unsupported in Linux.

Notably the critique of Framework in the original blog post does not offer these doubts. They are focused instead on the hardware design and tradeoffs between upgradability and uniform bodies. Those are real tradeoffs and Framework cannot solve them all without abandoning the upgradability part.

Yes. OneXfly apex. Amd 395+, oled panel.

High end machines which can easily pull 100W+ are just bad in general for portability - running at max will last less than 1Hr, will the sleep mode actually work reliably and not drain battery? - this is an issue in most OSes/laptops. Will video playback in the browser not be properly hardware accelerated and drain the battery super fast? yes linux has issues here.

Framework were explicitly ruled out, so: Integrated Oled - you really want some integration, If you can't set the brightness, goodbye lifespan, oled also have many different subpixel layouts which can make the text blurry/fringe, maybe you wont notice but then why buy an oled in the first place for work? While a monitor will definitely have pixel shift/burn in protection built in, if integrating a panel into the laptop without putting in any work, that support might not come out of the box

Even if it was a framework, everything is distro specific, but I think you only need to know that a "dock megathread" exists to realise that "perfectly working" is a stretch and a lot of people have hardware they can't connect and doesn't work.

That said if I was to buy a laptop - a mid end framework I just do the basics with would probably be great.