Six months of Framework
It was June 28 of this year that I unboxed my new Framework laptop. After 6 months of using it as my personal (non-work) machine, here are a few reflections.
- The hardware is very nice. I like the keyboard and screen, everything feels sturdy and usable. I haven’t swapped out my expansion cards yet; 2x USB C, 1x USB A, and 1x 250GB expansion card are all I really need. I did once do a talk at a meetup and forgot to bring my HDMI expansion port, resulting in some amusement from the crowd.
- I don’t regret choosing Fedora instead of Ubuntu as the main OS. While I’d always used Ubuntu in the past (either dual-booting Windows, via WSL, or the occasional bare install), Fedora is familiar enough and hasn’t prevented me using anything I need to for software development, browsing, and light document work. Everything I’ve plugged in, from external monitors to keyboards etc., has worked fine. I don’t think this should be taken for granted!
- I haven’t relied on its battery life, and it doesn’t seem fantastic. Though, compared to my aging XPS15 which gets 1 hour of battery usage tops, it’s obviously an improvement. I’ve taken it on some long train trips and used it for maybe 4-5 hours without exhausting the battery… I couldn’t spend 6 or 8 hours working a laptop in that kind of environment anyway, even if the battery were going to last that long.
About six weeks ago, I switched from GNOME as my desktop environment to KDE Plasma.
- The main motivation was because there’s a native option for scaling that isn’t 100% or 200% (I have it set to 125%). With the Framework 13’s screen resolution I find it quite important, as 100% is somewhat uncomfortably small.
- I didn’t have the same problems with GNOME that seem to cause a lot of animosity towards it (here’s an example), but I am sympethetic - they just didn’t cause me any practical issues with my usage. I found it a pleasantly-minimalistic environment with good defaults, and if it weren’t for the 125% scaling issue I’d probably not have bothered shopping around.
- Something I didn’t appreciate until I installed Plasma was the way GNOME just handled my keyring for me automatically.
After putting up with with Slack prompting me to create a wallet every time I opened it, then when I selected the non-deprecated-sounding wallet creation option and hitting a wall because I didn’t have a GPG key, I finally decided to bite the bullet and work it out.
It took me far too much searching and reading old blog posts, forum threads, and help articles before discovering this guide to setting up kwallet with git ssh keys, which even then didn’t work unmodified as my main key is
id_rsanotid_rsa_something. - Plasma by default seems to have a lot of cruft I don’t care about and had to trawl through settings to disable. The most egregious example was the OSX(?) style bouncy app icons on my cursor which are pretty ugly.
- Plasma doesn’t mount my external storage expansion card by default, which GNOME does, so sometimes when I boot up, downloads go into a broken state until I manually open the file browser, mount the drive, and restart them. I assume I will be able to fix this after some more terminal and/or settings page spelunking.
So basically, I like Plasma well enough to keep using it, but it was a harsh reminder of the kinds of niggling Linux-y config issues that I had forgotten about. It’s a more “traditional” looking desktop which I don’t prefer to GNOME’s minimalism, but it has comprehensive settings and good performance.