In my first year of university, I was the guy with the noisy old almost broken computer that we could hear in half of the amphitheater. So I decided to buy a new smaller, quieter laptop. It was pretty nice for the rest of my bachelor, but the battery was draining way too fast (about 2h of autonomy), and it was not that good when I opened both PyCharm and Chrome at the same time. I am the kind of person who doesn’t like to give up on hardware until it is totally broken. However, this time I wanted something just nice for my master, and I could give my computer to someone of my family who would have a more moderate usage. So last Christmas, I was offered a new computer from a pretty niche brand: a Framework computer.

The promise of Framework is to offer a Laptop with high repairability and customization. As of today, rarer are the brands that allow you to easily modify your hardware to upgrade your RAM of your storage. I can only think of those good old huge Thinkpad with a small grid on the bottom to open them easily.

It came out disassembled, but was straightforward to put in place and already helps you to know where are the different components. Another gimmick of Framework is their removable ports: you can choose to have an HDMI, USB-C, Ethernet, DisplayPort, and many others wherever and however you want on it (expect for the AMD processor, which requires some ports to be a specific place depending on their required voltage). The only issue of this gimmick is that the ports are really costly: it might range from ~20$ up to ~50$ depending on the kind of ports. Some people still make their own ports and upload them on GitHub, and I preferred to buy an adapter that can do USB-C to basically everything, for the price of one single port. At least, if one of my ports ends up twisted, I will be able to replace it.

I decided to install Fedora on it. While I often prefer debian for the more common apt installer, this is the main recommended distribution since the components are very recent, and Fedora one of the distributions that offer the latest drivers. I also wanted to try the KDE Plasma desktop environment: I previously tried Xfce, which was a bit too “ugly”, and GNOME that felt way too heavy and disorganized, while KDE offered a UI similar to the Windows one I was used to, with the customization I was looking for and a pretty moderate RAM usage.

I later added 16GB RAM stick to reach a total of 24GB. It was incredibly easy to open the machine, the only downside to the operation is that the screws have a special shape requiring the screwdriver given by the company, so using a normal screwdriver might not be that easy.

Another small downside is that, like many Laptops, the computer uses a magnet to detect if the lid is opened or closed. So putting your phone close to the left hinge disables the keyboard and might put the computer in sleep mode.

Apart from these minor inconvenience, I am able to open PyCharm, CLion, Android Studio and my other heavy IDE. I can still open Discord or Firefox in the background, and, thanks to Steam Proton compatibility layer, I was able to play heavy games such as Clair Obscur with my Linux computer.

I am globally pretty happy about this computer and this final Linux migration.