Their design aim was to make a laptop that is upgradeable and serviceable first. Not 100% Linux support first. This makes sense because software is much easier to improve after the fact than hardware.

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?

> which WiFi chipset you would rather they have used

That's what my last sentence was trying to express. Something can be shitty and also the best option.

My bad, I took that to be sarcasm.

I mean, Dell and Lenovo sell laptops with Linux pre-installed with Intel AX* WiFi boards that almost certainly suffer the same issue.

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.

I was thinking that there was a good Linux option out there. That may not be true.

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.

The issues are the same as always: drivers and suspend. Drivers are made worse by the intersection of newer hardware and lagging distros, suspend lately made worse by Intel’s changes in 11th gen and Microsoft pushing its vision of “modern standby”.

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).

New throwaway since this is a rant at an entitled software developer community…

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.