Framework 13 is the perfect (Linux) laptop
I haven’t used Mac for 5 years now (except my last job for 6 months because they only support mac developer environment).
For my 8 years at Reddit, my first work laptop was a Macbook Pro, but that’s only because I didn’t know I have a choice when onboarding. Then, after 2 years, when I finally had the chance to refresh my laptop, I switched to a Dell laptop with Linux. The Dell laptop was huge and heavy and not as premium as a Mac. But the software experience was just so much better. Then, on the 2nd refresh, I switched to a Chromebook, relying on Crostini for development.
Then I left Reddit and joined Shopify. Shopify only provide Macs for engineers as their development environment only supports Mac. So I was “forced” to use Mac again. Its software experience is just so bad (and that’s just one example). Even their trackpad is worse than I remembered, and theirs are supposed to be best in the industry?
Anyways, 6 months later, I decided to join a startup, and had this conversaion with our CTO:
And as a result, I now have an (almost) maxed out Framework 13, with Debian testing and KDE Plasma, as my work laptop: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, 2.8K display, 48GB memory, 1TB SSD. This was roughly 1 month before the Framework 13 Pro announcement, so no LPCAMM2 memory nor touchscreen for me.
And it’s just such a good experience. There’re physical mic and camera switches; I can swap the USB-C ports to USB-A for yubikey nano, or to ethernet, or to HDMI, or to card readers; I can have translucent bazel or USB-C ports; And most importantly, when I need to upgrade to touchscreen, or LPCAMM2 memory, I can just upgrade those parts, without replacing the whole laptop. The only complaint I have hardware-wise is that the screen is less bright than I used to, but the new touchscreen is also bright, so maybe I’ll just upgrade to that at some point.
Software-wise, nowadays Linux is just so much better than Mac. I use Debian testing with nixpkgs, so when occasionally there are something I need not in Debian’s repository, I usually can get them from nixpkgs (for example, currently Debian testing only has Neovim 0.11, but I can get 0.12 from nixpkgs). From driver side, everything just works. The only issue I had was with the built-in microphone, but that’s actually just a small config issue. I also use clevis with dracut to bind the full disk encryption key into TPM so I don’t have to type it on every boot, following this doc. There’s a small bug in dracut causing an ordering issue with systemd that’s already fixed upstream but not in Debian yet, so I just put this one line into /etc/dracut.conf.d/50-clevis-fix.conf to fix it:
install_items+=" /usr/lib/systemd/system/cryptsetup.target "
While I still love ChromeOS for personal casual use, currently the lack of support for cgroup v2 in Crostini is starting to cause serious issues. Likely Baguette and/or AluminiumOS will make things better. But for now, if I need to replace my personal Chromebook, I’d just buy a new Framework 13 Pro. The modular, everything is upgradable/repairable vision is just so good.