Telecoms in Canada are a problem…in NS they’ve been talking about putting in high-speed lines to connect the province for years. The government give contracts and money to companies (like Bell), but the lines never get placed. I have family who had to try an do school online from outside the city during COVID lockdowns, and it was pretty much impossible for them. That’s unacceptable in my book.
Even for a cell phone, we are paying far too much compared to other countries
My laptop arrived yesterday [free, two day express delivery from FedEx which was perfect] and so far I really like it… 
I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to design, manufacture & sell a quality, zero tradeoff laptop [that runs non-Windows] with this user-owned and repairable philosophy.
I bought the DIY version with the i7-1165G7, as I wanted the extra frequency and the 96 EU GPU.
Build instructions were well written and easy to follow, with the wi-fi card install being to only slightly tricky part.
Because my initial testing is with an SSD with Windows already installed, most annoying part was the windows driver install… I personally wish it was a zip file not a self-extracting executable file.
Note: after installing the Framework provided drivers, Intel’s Driver Support Assistant [that I previously installed when using the SSD on an 8th Gen NUC] found newer graphics drivers [direct from Intel], and they installed fine [I tested before and after performance using 3DMark].
I added a 32 GB set of Kingston HyperX Impact 3200 MHz [that I already owned from a previous ASRock X300 Mini project, that changed direction, and I ended up turning into into a min-NAS, running TrueNAS, that I gave to a relative].
Initial testing with Windows for benchmarking / browsing / video viewing / wi-fi and battery testing, etc. Everything looking good so far.
As expected, performance is very comparable to an M1 Macbook Air for CPU, with the Xe the GPU being better, but, again, as expected, the battery life is nowhere near as good; ~5 hours versus ~12+ hours].
Thermals seem decent.
Fan is fairly loud*, but OK, as the sound is not unpleasant [*it’s certainly loud versus the fan-less Macbook Air].
I have a 2 TB WD SN750 SSD arriving today that will get a clean install of Ubuntu 21.10 [with a 5.15.x kernel], and then I plan on using this as my daily driver… primarily to see if I can finally make the switch from OS X/macOS, which I’ve been using as my primary laptop and desktop OS since OS X release day [on a G3 Pismo]… 