First experiences with the Framework Laptop

I bought a Framework Laptop (13-inch) a bit ago, and I’m absolutely in love with it. A friend encouraged me to write about it, so here’s what I did with it.

Configuration & checkout

I went with 32 GB of ram on the i5-1340P (13-inch 13th gen Intel), as the i7s didn’t seem to be as much of an improvement as they would cost. I’m a very big fan of the Expansion Cards system that is in use - I got two USB-C, two USB-A, and then spare SD card reader and HDMI cards in case I need them. I also got the DIY edition because it’s fun to assemble!

Turns out that my email on my Framework account was wrong because of a typo. Oops! I emailed support about it - they eventually got around to it, but only after the laptop arrived, so I had to log in with the typo’d email to get tracking information.

It arrived in 4 days, shipping from Taiwan to the eastern United States. The day before it arrived, the shipment stayed in a nearby city for the entire day, and I noted that on the FedEx website it indicated that the package was requested to be delivered on a weekday. Not great for me being impatient, but probably useful for someone.

Unboxing and assembly

The laptop arrived in a giant box of boxes with all the parts required to assemble it (including the screwdriver). Negative points for no gummy bears.

Opening the box itself, the laptop looks beautiful with no input cover or bezel on it. Every part is labeled with a QR code for repair information and sometimes some small text with extra info.

Assembly was simple, but I got a bit nervous putting in the RAM (“is it supposed to push down that much”) and the input cover (“oh god oh fuck what if I break this cable”). The installation was mostly slotting pieces together and allowing magnets to do the rest. The right side of the input cover being intentionally not aligned to the case until the bottom screws were tightened confused me.

My initial notes:

• I’m a big fan of how the laptop looks, such that I haven’t even put any stickers on it yet.
• Having manual kill switches for both audio and video at the top is a very big plus for me.
• The keyboard feels surprisingly good! I expected struggle using it (given that I actively work with a split keyboard on my desk) but I was able to get accustomed to it almost instantly.

I plugged it in for charge, pressed the power button, and… the power indicator turned on and off. Uh oh!

I read online causes and read that the battery may be unplugged. It seemed fine, though, so I just let it sit for a few minutes to charge and tried again. Worked, lol.

Installation

I decided to go with Fedora (Workstation) for my operating system. I usually use NixOS, but I got quite tired of NixOS being NixOS, and I also wanted an excuse to use Fedora more.

Basically everything worked out of the box on Fedora (as advertised). I copied my SSH and PGP key over with a USB drive and imported them, and then installed Nix and cloned my dotfiles repository. home-manager brought everything automatically, minus the fonts for some reason? I manually created a fonts directory and installed a Nerd Font into it, because I didn’t want to bother.

I also had to create a custom session in GDM to get into awesome, and I had to tweak my configs to change my DPI/font size to match this screen. I then tried to open a terminal, and… nothing. Why?

I ran kitty in another terminal (GNOME Terminal) to see what was up:

julian@thegame:~$ kitty
[078 13:14:11.662882] [glfw error 65542]: GLX: No GLXFBConfigs returned
[078 13:14:11.662893] [glfw error 65545]: GLX: Failed to find a suitable GLXFBConfig
[078 13:14:11.662897] Failed to create GLFW temp window! This usually happens because of old/broken OpenGL drivers. kitty requires working OpenGL 3.3 drivers.

After a fair bit of googling, and realizing this only happened on packages I had installed from nixpkgs (glxgears worked), I found nixGL and installed it. I modified my dotfiles to use it, with blatant disregard for compatibility with my other machines (lol).

Most things worked out of the box. I also installed XIVLauncher and it managed to run FFXIV at a crisp 30 fps at 720p on low settings. That’s Intel for you!

Actually using it

I haven’t been using the laptop for very long, but I’ve already got a few comments about its use.

• It performs pretty badly in games (expectedly). The 16-inch model is likely a lot better for people that need a dedicated GPU for gaming or creative work.
• The screen isn’t that good in sunlight. I took it with me to a park in mid-day, and while it was usable, it wasn’t very easy to make out some things.
• The keyboard feels very nice for me with the exception of the Backspace key, which seems to… squeak??? What???
• The trackpad scrolls wayyyy too fast for my liking. There’s probably a way to configure the speed in software but I dunno how.
• Brightness function keys didn’t work until I ran sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="module_blacklist=hid_sensor_hub". Volume function keys only seem to work when I press them really fast and also have another key down(???).
• It compiles code about as fast as my own PC, which is impressive. Compiling pluggy both took around 11 seconds.