That’s it up there, fully assembled, Fedora installed, and ready to go :)
It’s the next step in a journey I started last year, when I decided it was time to ditch the Mac and move to open-source.
Switching hasn’t been easy. I’ve been a Mac user for nearly a quarter-century, going all the way back to the days of Bondi Blue iMac and the puck mouse. But the days when Apple was hands-down the best at building hardware and software that “just works” and delights have been over for a few years now. Last year, the steady drop in software quality and simultaneous bad-faith fights with regulators (really, Apple, you couldn’t allow another App Store? or lower the usurious rate you charge devs for your increasingly arbitrary app review?) finally got too much for me. I decided it was time to switch, not to Windows (barf) but to Linux.
So I ditched my iPhone and bought an Android (Samsung Galaxy Pro, it’s…fine. It’s fine.). Sold my Apple Watch and bought a Google Watch (also fine, though I’ve got a Pebble on order I’m excited to try out this spring).
And while I kept my M1 Macbook Pro around in case things got dicey, I bought Lemur Pro from System76 as my first foray into the Linux trenches in a couple decades.
That turned out to be a good short-term fix (the Lemur Pro was relatively cheap), and a way to get my bearings in the modern Linux landscape. But not a long-term solution. The Lemur Pro was under-powered, for one, and constantly running its fans for even the smallest task (two browser tabs? oh no, fans). It’s screen resolution was also a disappointment after living with Macs for so long. But it was light, and had battery life for days, and ran Ubuntu just fine, so it was a nice gateway machine.
A year in, thought, I definitely needed an upgrade. I debated getting a Pangolin from System76, or a StarLabs machine. I tried out two laptops from Tuxedo Computers, even. None of them seemed quite right for me.
Enter the Framework Laptop 13.
Why a Framework?
In brief: longevity.
I’ve been in the habit of upgrading my laptop every year or two. As a Mac user, that always meant listing my old machine for sale, hoping the value had held up, and then dropping down a chunk of cash for the latest and greatest.
Which was both very expensive (that Apple premium) and not always feasible. Sometimes the laptop wouldn’t sell. Sometimes the latest Mac meant signing onto design mistakes (looking at you, Touch Bar) or lemons (cough butterfly keyboard cough) that I wasn’t always willing to splurge on.
But the Framework’s different! Designed from the ground up to be not just repairable, but replaceable. Meaning I can not only swap out the RAM in this thing, or shove a larger hard drive in when I need it, but I can replace the CPU as well. Or the display. Or the keyboard.
In other words, with a Framework I’m not stuck replacing the whole thing every time I need an upgrade. I can go piece by piece, replacing what I want when I want.
Finally, a laptop that can grow with me.
Specs
The rundown: AMD Ryan AI 7 350, 2TB harddrive, 32GB of RAM. Basically, the most I could get and stick with my $3,000 CAD budget.
Assembly
They say it only takes 15 minutes, but that wasn’t my experience. I was careful, the directions are kind of vague, and I was doing it for the first time, so for me it was more like an hour.
And that’s okay! An hour to assemble a laptop isn’t so bad. And oddly enough, because the directions were kind of bad, I felt more accomplishment at the end. Like I’d figured out a puzzle based on a fuzzy photo of the final image. I feel more attached to this machine, not less, because of the mental effort I had to spend in putting it together.
Battery Life
It sucks. Really.
I mean, ten years ago it would have been amazing. But these days, losing 20% charge while in suspend mode overnight is rather lame.
This is especially hard for me, coming from the Lemur Pro, which could run for days on a single charge. Hopefully, Framework will come out with a larger battery for this thing. Until then, I’m keeping the charging cable close.
Update: Okay, the battery life got a lot better when I turned off Bluetooth. Kind of a pain when I want to hook it up to my external monitor and use my wireless keyboard and mouse, but I can kind of forgive it because I prefer typing on its own keyboard anyway (see below).
Keyboard
Simply a joy to type on. For me, the keyboard is better than anything Apple’s produced since the M1 Macbook.
Display
It’s pretty good! I thought the 3:2 ratio would bother me more, but really, I don’t notice it much. Brightness is fine, even at mid-levels to preserve the battery. Text is crisp and clear, which is the most important thing, to me.
Performance
I haven’t run any benchmarks, but so far it seems…fine? I went with the mid-range Ryzen chip, and while it definitely seems better than the chip in the Lemur Pro, it also doesn’t blow me away.
Which is okay! It’s actually more important to me that the fans don’t spin up everytime I open a new webpage, which is definitely what happened with the Lemur Pro on the regular. A nice, quiet, cool-running machine that keeps up with my everyday tasks is, really, all I could ask for.
The OS
I went with the recommended Fedora install. It’s my first time using this distro (well, in anything other than a server, anyway), and so far I’m impressed. It seems a bit more polished than stock Ubuntu, with its workspaces and trackpad gestures. Not so different that I had a large learning curve, but enough of a positive change that I’m probably going to stick with it.
Do I Miss the Mac?
Not really. I miss certain applications, like Fantastical. But for the most part, the software I use either has a Linux version or a capable web app, so I’m able to get everything I need done.
And some of the replacements are better (that is, simpler and more robust) than what’s current on the Mac side of things. I’ll go into more detail in another post, but I think using dnf or flatpaks for software distribution and using Nextcloud for files/tasks/etc is a better experience than Apple’s way.
Conclusion
So, over all, I’m a fan, and looking forward to keeping this machine for a long time, upgrading it along the way.
