29 Jan 2025 on chupson's Blog
A while ago, I bought the Framework Laptop 13, after selling the M2 MacBook Air I had been using for a little over a year, and I regret nothing. I love my new laptop and am very glad I made the switch.
Before I had to buy a laptop for school, I used a desktop computer, on which I installed my first Linux distro1 after having had used Windows for a looong time. I decided to get the MacBook because I believed it to be the best choice for a school environment, and was (sadly) willing to sacrifice Linux support.
I quickly grew to regret my decision. macOS felt much too closed-off and un-tweakable for my liking, and the hardware itself felt very fragile, which was certainly not helped by the prices of repairs on Apple devices, which are so high that at some point you might just get a new device (which is likely exactly what they want you to do). This all led to my finally deciding to sell the MacBook, and buy one of Framework’s machines instead.
I went with the DIY edition of the Framework Laptop 13, with the AMD chip and no operating system, no RAM and no SSD. And I have to say, it’s amazing that Framework allows it. They could easily force customers to buy memory and storage directly from them, but they don’t, they let you order them from elsewhere, potentially at lower prices (which I did). I put a 1TB SSD drive and two 16GB RAM sticks that I bought from a local tech store.
And, if it were a regular laptop it’s… good. It isn’t a great laptop, there’s nothing truly extraordinary about it, but everything works fine. The screen looks fine, and I found the irregular 3:2 aspect ratio to not be a problem. The keyboard and trackpad are both just fine, not nearly the best I’ve seen on a laptop but also not the worst. The performance is really good, more than enough for my use-case, and the battery life is, unsurprisingly, much worse than a MacBook Air, but also not terrible.
That, however, is only if you treat the Framework laptop as a regular laptop. But it’s not trying to be a “regular” laptop. Framework is trying to “fix consumer electronics” and that it is doing very well.
The Framework laptop is an absolute dream-come-true when it comes to repairability, upgradeability and modularity. For starters, there are the modular ports. Instead of having permanent IO ports like a regular computer might, the FW13 has 4 slots into which expansion cards can be freely inserted. With those, the possibilities are endless - apart from the many cards Framework sells, there exist expansion cards built by the community, thanks to the openness of Framework’s design, and the availability of all necessary schematics and such. The cards can be very easily exchanged, without needing to even turn off the laptop. I have two USB-C (in a very pretty lavender color), two USB-As, and one HDMI port.
Changing any of the other parts of the laptop is also possible and a great experience. Framework sells all of the parts you could ever want at very reasonable prices, and replacing them is truly a breeze. Assembling the DIY laptop once it arrived was a wonderfully easy process, and opening the laptop is never a problem. Everything can literally be done with one screwdriver (which Framework sends you, by the way). I counted, and installing a stick of RAM2 literally took less than 5 minutes. Opening regular laptops is truly a nightmare. Granted, I have little experience, but the few laptops I opened other than the FW13, were actively fighting against me, so I have much appreciation for the FW13.
I am happy to look past the imperfections of the FW13 to get the peace of mind that it gives me. I can rest easy knowing that if something in my laptop were to break, I could get it replaced easily, by myself, without having to sell a kidney. Upgrades are also not a problem. The laptop will likely stay with me for a long time, since Framework promises any new hardware, including chips with better performance, will be fully compatible with existing laptops, meaning I’d be able to simply insert the new piece of hardware into my laptop, without having to buy a whole new machine.
And the Linux support is great. I have nothing to complain about.
I frankly don’t remember what the first distro I installed was. It was probably Ubuntu or something similar, but in my first week of using Linux I jumped around so much I can’t remember practically any of the distros I tried. I do remember, however, which distro I finally landed on - Pop!_OS, which became the first Linux distro I actually used as my daily-driver. ↩︎
I only put in one 16GB stick one first assembling the laptop, but later on I order a second one. ↩︎