Here are my thoughts after roughly 2.5 days of usage. I’m running Plasma on Arch linux. I’m coming from 2015 Macbook Pro 13", on which I had the same Plasma-Arch setup. I was using a borrowed old-ish Macbook Air with macOS for a couple months before the framework came in.
It took me a little longer than expected to assemble the laptop, but that’s probably because I was being overly cautious. It was a fun—and unrivaled—experience. The WiFi card can be a pain to install though, as I’m sure you’ve already heard.
The Good:
- The screen can get really bright. With Plasma’s fractional scaling everything looks pretty solid too.
- The keyboard is great. I prefer it to apple laptop keyboards tbh.
- The touchpad also feels great*
- The anti-slip things on the bottom look like they’ll last. The ones on my previous laptop flattened and came off after a few years of use.
- No camera complaints. The camera toggle on the bezel does its job just fine.
- The expansion cards are a little hard to remove, but they look well-built.
- I like the charging cable. It’s fairly long, but I still wish it were a little longer.
The repairability and upgradability potential should go without saying.
The meh:
- The screen is really glossy; with dark backgrounds, especially with low brightness, you’ll be looking at your face a lot. I think I can live with it, so I won’t be buying a matte screen protector.
- [*] I miss touchpad gestures
and, to a lesser degree, tap to click. I’m a little spoilt by macbook touchpads. Also, I think I recently noticed some weird touchpad behaviour when the laptop is at an angle, but I’ll have to look into that more closely. - The hinge feels a little too wobbly. Particularly, the screen moves a little too much when I move the bottom of the laptop or the surface on which it’s placed. It’s definitely more of an issue here compared to the apple laptop line, but I’m not sure how it stacks up against other laptop brands.
- The output from the speakers seems a little muffled. I haven’t directly compared it with other laptops’ speakers though.
The bad:
- The CPU throttling issue. I hope there’s some way to fix this short of component replacements.
- The ring of light around the power button is really annoying. I hear that we’ll get a BIOS fix for that at some point, so I’m looking forward to that.
- The battery. I’ve been using devices with busted batteries for a while so I don’t have a good sense for what’s satisfactory and what’s not, but the ~4.5 hours I’m getting with the framework—with full battery health—seems a bit on the low side. I’ll look into the tips other linux users have shared.
Haven’t had a chance to set up or test the fingerprint reader or the in-built mic.
Overall I’m pretty satisfied and look forward to using this device for years to come!