Just received the laptop this afternoon and hope sharing some early impressions might be useful to some people. Overall I am incredibly pleased with the laptop, this is an excellent product on its own merits as it is at the moment, and anticipating further upside - which I would say seems likely from the interactivity of the Framework team here - is exciting!
Briefly my hardware details and outline of setup steps:
- DIY i7-1165G7, 2x16GB memory, SN850 500GB SSD, AX210 non-vPro
- with the benefit of Community reviews - #7 by Michael_Lingelbach and the updated guides, opening up the laptop and installing the hardware was trouble-free. One slight freestyle was putting an extra crimp in the black wire connecting to the Wifi card to try and keep its metal tip from contacting the white wire’s tip, although not sure if that actually matters
- ran Linux Mint Xfce 20.2 from a thumbdrive, installed to SSD, upgraded kernel to 5.11.0-25 along with headers, modules, and modules-extra (as Debian based Linux on the Framework Laptop - #11 by Anita_Lewis), with which Wifi and the trackpad just worked
Echo all of @Michael_Lingelbach 's pros. Coming from a Thinkpad x201 the typing experience is smooth sailing, and the touchpad is smooth/responsive/accurate. The fan seems to engage at a pretty aggressive temperature but even then in non-media use essentially never needs to engage, and when it does it does not run loud. Screen is simply gorgeous, yes on the more reflective side but at least in my office and home office not to the point of causing any problems; in theory a sample pack of matte protectors should be coming in soon and might have one that takes a little of the glare edge off. Did a video call on which the camera and microphone performed very well, if anything a bit better than a Logitech C920. The speakers performed well for the purpose, everybody sounded clear.
On the other hand, at least so far have not had as much trouble with the cons, knock on wood. Maybe this is something distribution-dependent, but I got a pretty decent run out of the battery - about six hours of web browsing, then installing Miniconda and a few environments within it, then compiling three releases of Octave (my laziness not wanting to avoid deprecated methods, so instead just keep several releases around), and the battery was only down to 20%. Only spent about fifteen minutes streaming video from Youtube though, so maybe media is more harsh on the battery. The base heats up a bit but never to the point of feeling uncomfortable. Have been compulsively checking on the power button for heat but even though the driver is not installed (not particularly bothered not having a fingerprint sensor) it hasn’t yet gotten to be noticeably warm.
So not terribly useful for the Framework team in terms of possible to-dos, but a definite vote of confidence in the laptop. Hope everybody’s experience is as good!