Laptops are sold as an appliance for the most part, they have to own it’s quality.
Actually more than that, this should first be an excellent laptop and then the repairability and customisable it should be layered on top of that without compromising it (too much), as opposed to the other way around.
I understand the sleep issues but battery life is miserable generally - the sleep issues only exacerbate an already pretty-much-terrible situation. Fortunately I don't really need significant battery life but if I did I'd be looking to unload this thing at this point.
Which makes me wonder - maybe the Intel wifi board has a lot of problems but is still the best Linux option...
And I'm curious to know which WiFi chipset you would rather they have used, as most alternatives either have worse Linux support or aren't as advanced as Intel's. Would you rather they used Broadcom, The bane of WiFi and Linux?
That's what my last sentence was trying to express. Something can be shitty and also the best option.
I’m not trying to give Framework (or any other laptop maker) a free pass here, just saying that it’s not a unique problem to this laptop.
One of the benefits that a company like Framework has is that they don't have to support everything. They can be like Apple and tailor their hardware choices to the ones best supported by the software.
To me, Asahi Linux is the most exciting thing going on in Linux-land right now. They have a very small number of hardware configurations to support. In theory, they should be able to get it really dialed in and polished to the point where it just works. I don't care if they go for KDE or Gnome, SystemD or SysVinit, or anything else in particular. If it works right from the start and is extraordinarily stable, I'll learn to love the choices they make.
Asahi is more of a project for driver and related development and upstreaming it. They do plan to release a distro, but the current plan is for it to just be Arch with the bleeding edge of their work applied (so perhaps not the “dialed-in” you’re looking for since Arch is far from that). IMO, Asahi is just solving the same issue with anything else: lack of drivers for some hardware. It just so happens that the hardware is very specific and popular. My feeling is that I don’t want to invest in hardware whose manufacturer is unwilling to invest at all in my use-case (Linux).
Do you want open computing?
Or Apple?
Pick one.
I’m really tired of the IT community that just wants high paying jobs but none of the skills that earn them.
As a hardware designer; do better, software “engineers”.
If the community is going to claim the title, it damn well better start engineering better than these awful websites and hacky operating system kernels and GUIs that glitch.
Or stfu over others efforts which are a bit beyond memorizing textbook math and recalling them via your text editor with algorithmic help.
Look at all the non-contributors certain they can do better.
Anecdotally, my battery life is plenty good when actually using it (I've yet to feel like I need to reach for the charger at all unless I started very low), but everyone's use case is different.
- Re battery: Yup, battery life during sleep sucks, it seems like this is mostly an Intel 11th gen issue as S3 sleep went away and folks on Dell, Lenovo, etc., 11th gen hardware have similar issues.
- Re Fan: it does seem to like to ramp up a bit too much even when components are not really that hot yet.
- Re USB-C: have not used that, so cannot comment
- Re build quality: yes, it is a bit flimsier than I would like (though have definitely used laptops that are way worse), but it is also lighter than competitors that are less so. I am mostly okay with that trade-off, others may not be.
As you say, the company has been responsive and helpful on the community forums in a way the big players never have been, and the BIOS updates are fixing genuine issues and complaints with real release notes. It's not all great for sure, but there's lots of things that are a lot better than competitors.