[Comment] QMK Status and General Open Source

Framework Laptop 16
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DISCLAIMER: This is solely my own oppinion and something may sound rude. I still very like my Framework and i am still happy the way their progressing and would love to see it grow even further, so without further ado…

Framework boasts itself with supporting the open-source community by providing the code, schematics, electric plans, 3d models etc.
But for QMK somehow they put it into a state where, if you just use their stock VIA firmware, it works. If you ever so slightly change 1 line of code…

BASIC QMK Functionality breaks immediately!

examples:

  1. Try setting up Layer Based RGB Lightning on a macropad with only adding the code for managing the layer lightning => will not work due their way they sync the numlock state
  2. Try setting up an own cool RGB Lightning effect => good luck with that, the indezes of the keys are changing magically location everytime you recompile and reflash the same version to the board (also you could fix this with some additional code it’s still annoying if you dont know how)
  3. try merging qmk code from the official one. good luck figuring out which changes you can override and which own changes made by FW you need to keep
  4. last real “update” was DECEMBER 2023 (and some commits early january this year for probably the demo of the 2nd gen event)

For me this looks like they put it into some 90% state where it works for their needs, ignoring some best practices of QMK about describing their keyboard and will keep it that way because for everyone who does not want to compile their own version, it just “works”.
Except it doesn’t for the ones trying to heavily modify it.

With all these new products it looks like they still on the focus about creating more products and selling things instead of fixing/correcting their stuff. Especially the “desktop” looks like a vendor-lockin product to increase and create a stable revenue for the next years.
I hope they will not keep releasing new produts and dragging legacy problems (like QMK) forever with them but fix them and keep maintaining them.

I would LOVE to spend a whole weekend creating PRs and fixing stuff, but to me it looks like their interaction for QMK with us is just plain dead.

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Yeah, the upstreaming PR was abandoned after they got the third round of feedback on the same day as they asked for it. Not a good look.

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What branch are you building from?

Others have shown off custom RGB Lightning code, one showed whole custom effects they created iirc. Another created an OpenRGB build with per-key lighting control. Not to mention a number of great non-lighting code people have created.

Certainly FW’s failure to work through the process of upstreaming the changes they needed to make to the QMK core is not good.

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I build from the latest release of FW: v0.2.9

Yeah thats totally possible and not very complicated. My sentence also has a slight condition

Thats the important part. If you start your keymap from scratch or leave some stuff out from their code, all the possibilites you mentioned are very easily done.
FW should have made a clean code in the first place.

Most people start with QMK by just copying an existing and go from there. With this approach you will hit the error i mentioned on bullet point 1 and it will probably take some time to debug it

To be fair: i got all my stuff working now (except this kinda crappy numlock layering state stuff, where i am not sure if the problem comes from QMK or FW site…, it got it like 90% done but sometimes the sync does not work properly. need to dig deeper into QMK sleep states i think but that should be done by the keyboard manufacturer)