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_rsa not id_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.

Filed under:framework

I’m really excited to go Linux full-time with a just-arrived Framework 13" running Fedora. The experience has been fantastic so far. DIY setup, software installation, customisation, wifi, external screens, Flathub apps, everything Just Works. This is definitely my year of Linux On The Desktop.

I did have one assembly hiccup which felt scary. An extra magnet had snuck in on top of one that was supposed to be there, so the input surface (keyboard+touchpad) didn’t fit on properly. I didn’t realise what the raised component was for a while, and was getting set up to contact support, ask the community etc. But fortunately I realised and just prised the extra magnet off then everything was perfect.

I guess that’s the kind of thing you sign up for when getting a DIY assembly version. I’m just glad it wasn’t an actual problem as I was so keen to get started using it.

And let me tell you, after Windows’ evolution in recent years, using an open-source operating system which hasn’t been enshittified to death by megacorp product managers just feels… so clean.

Filed under:framework