Honestly, if it had separate in/out TRS, I would consider it a lot more, but would likely still pass. I don’t think I’ve connected wired audio to any computer through an onboard or internal connector in the last five years… where I need good audio, I have a separate USB device that has a good datasheet available. When I don’t need good audio, but do want a headset or headphone, I use BT… that’s what it was designed for in the first place, and BT Ceti eels are cheap.
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I’m going to use it mainly for development, which is work, college, and hobby projects. I bought a plethora of expansion cards, definitely more than I can fit at once, so I shouldn’t be running short on ports. I also decided to bring my own ram and ssd because I was able to buy the exact same models at much lower prices. I didn’t get a GPU for it, so probably no gaming, at least not initially.
I’m actually thinking of replacing my desktop pc with my new laptop. The laptop seems like it could outperform my desktop pc, with a significantly more powerful cpu, DDR5, and a much faster SSD. If so, I think I might buy an eGPU enclosure and turn my desktop’s RX 6800 XT into an eGPU that I’ll use with my laptop. Then I’ll repurpose my desktop pc into a second server, because my home server has way too much to do as it is.
I’m not sure how exactly the eGPU idea is going to work, but hopefully there will be options. I’ll cross that bridge if the laptop is faster than my PC.
As for the OS, it’ll be arch (btw) that I will probably just migrate from my current laptop.
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This will be a desktop replacement system for me. My current machine is one I built 6 years ago and it’s starting to show its age with games and other tasks. I thought about building another desktop but decided against it for portability and size. 90% of the time this machine will be sitting on my desk connected to my setup through a dock but the few times a year I have to travel for work, it’ll be nice to take this guy along.
I picked up the following bundle:
Framework 16 with Ryzen 9 CPU
Graphics Expansion Module
2 USB-C modules
1 HDMI module
1 Display port module
1 Ethernet module
1 USB-A module
2 LED Matrix Spacers (looking forward to playing around with these to see what is possible)
Currently I run Linux Mint as my desktop OS but I’ve been thinking of switching back to Zorin when version 17 comes out as it’s finally hit a maturity of features that have impressed me a bit.
Oh, since we’re doing order posts too…
Batch 8
Configuration
- System: Ryzen™ 9 7940HS
- Operating System: Windows 11 Home (Download)
Expansion Bay System:
- Expansion Bay Module: Expansion Bay Shell
Customization:
- Keyboard: International English - Linux
- Laptop Bezel: Framework Laptop 16 Bezel - Black
- Power Adapter Region: US / CA
- Numpad: Numpad Module
Expansion Cards:
- DisplayPort (2nd Gen)
- Ethernet
- Audio
- 2 x USB-A
- 2 x USB-C – USB-C Expansion Card
- MicroSD
- HDMI (3rd Gen)
- 2 x Storage – 250GB
Accessories:
- 2 x Extra Spacer: Black
- 2 x Extra Spacer: LED Matrix
- Extra Medium Input Module: RGB Macropad Module
General use. More development/browsing oriented. Some gaming, but no GPU. The thing is way too expensive when I have an entire desktop. Already have this as more expensive than my desktop. Would rather a battery expansion instead of a weak GPU.
- Ryzen™ 7 7840HS
- 64 GB Framework RAM
- 2230 SSD
- Linux keyboard
- Numpad
- 2xUSB-A
- 2xUSB-C
- 1xDisplayPort (2nd Gen)
- 1xMicroSD
- 1xHDMI (3rd Gen)
- 1xEthernet
- 1xAudio
- 1xLiberated Systems 4G LTE (3rd party)
- SD card when it comes out.
- Some kind of SSD. Maybe 2/4TB
- Dbrand skin
Maybe some other stuff.
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It is going to be my carry-around laptop. I have a desktop at home but I take my laptop with me to work, to friend’s places, with me on trips out of town, etc. I already carry around a 16" laptop so the size of it won’t be anything I’m not used to so I don’t see any problems with that. Shoutout to the LTT backpack for that not being a hassle to do. It went with the 7840HS and 32 GB of RAM. I am bringing my own SSD since Framework didn’t have any 4TB offerings in the configurations. I am not going with the graphics expansion this first generation because the 780M should be good enough for something on the go, and if I am headed somewhere like a LAN gaming thing with friends I have an eGPU enclosure already.
If Framework keeps going and they stay around then in time I could see it becoming a desktop replacement as I can just upgrade it instead of two systems.
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I’ll be using my FW16 to replace both my current laptop and my desktop. Both systems are pretty old. The laptop is a 2017 Razer Blade Pro with an i7 7700H and a GTX 1060 with 16 GB of RAM. My desktop is slightly older running a i7 6850K and a GTX 1080 with 32 GB of RAM.
I hardly have time to sit at my desktop, and I use my laptop for work and games when I’m away from home. I had been thinking about going to just a laptop setup due to how little time I’ve got to sit down at my desktop and game. Most of my gaming happens when I’m out of town and I only use the laptop for work. I had eyeing Framwork for a bit since the first LTT video about it and was super excited to hear about the 16".
I was going to wait for more GPU options and maybe Intel CPUs, but the power adapter on my laptop broke (unfortunately it doesn’t support USB charging through the Thunderbolt 3 port). So that forced my hand and I pulled the trigger on getting a FW16. I ended up having to buy a used power adapter for now since I wont get my FW16 till Q2. I had been wanting a USB-C charging laptop for a bit so this situation wouldn’t happen but unfortunately it happened before I made the switch.
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I’ll be setting up two of these as desktop replacements for my parents. So basically office work. The previous 12 year old (original i3) systems in full towers. Time to reduce size/weight. Adding a dedicated NAS for file backup. Going to use a USB-C docking station for port expansion & power.
Also switching them to Linux. I’m not going to Win 11.
I’m hoping I’ll be able to buy an M.2 expansion bay. Would make some things easier in case of failure.
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My FW16 will be my personal daily driver, running NixOS, doing daily driver things like:
- Email, web, budgeting, chatting, general boring computer use
- Maintaining our slightly over-complicated home network
- Family tech support
- Research and writing
- Experimenting with infosec toys (I’m now management but I’m trying not to lose all my tech chops)
- The occasional side gig to earn extra $$$
I configured it with:
- Ryzen 7 7840HS
- 32 GB RAM (2x16)
- 2TB SSD
Port layout will likely be variable (that’s rather the point of this modular design, right?), but I bought one of everything plus extra USB-C.
I’m prime sandwich generation, so it’s all about being able to get things done from wherever I happen to be, without my old lady eyes going buggy from a tiny screen.
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I’m hoping to retire my tablet, which is impossible to use with a keyboard, as right now it is even too unwieldy for some reading.
For me, it’ll be an investigation of the viability of Linux on a laptop as a daily driver, same as this Framework 13 (11th gen, very mixed results so far).
I’m interested in escaping from Apple. My old MacBook Pro would still serve me just great if I could upgrade the RAM. Of course, I can’t upgrade the RAM. (The less said about Apple’s practice of soldering down SSDs, the lower my blood pressure.)
It being an exploratory personal device, I’ll be poking at hardware and software with a particular eye toward: battery life, standby times, color profiles (can I look at an image in a web browser that isn’t horrifically oversaturated?), touchpad acceleration curves and palm rejection, speaker quality, gaming experience…
After that it’s all software considerations. Pretty much all the standard computer uses you might think of: documents, media, hobbies, network stuff, security, sandboxing / desktop-oriented containerization, OCR, doing taxes, home automation, maybe some iPhone “magic” interoperability if there are any good hacks floating around out there.
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Out of curiosity, what have the results been like so far? What are your use cases? Personally, since your goal is to switch from a MacBook to a Linux-powered Framework laptop, I’d recommend the KDE Plasma Desktop spin of Fedora due to the combination of Fedora being a Linux distribution that officially supported by Framework, and my preference for KDE over Fedora’s Default GNOME interface.
You can also virtualize Windows with virt-manager, and even dedicate the dGPU to the VM for Windows gaming if you want.
Personally, I’m using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to use Linux tools natively on Windows.
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I’m really trying to not turn this into a rambling off-topic dissertation. 
I haven’t yet made any serious effort to adopt a Linux laptop as a daily driver. There are too many near-deal breakers for it to be worth the effort, especially when I’d still have to keep a Mac around, if relegated to the closet, for iOS development (and I’m not completely sure I’m willing to give up being a customer of the Apple platform indie software scene). Happily, I am in a position to abandon Windows entirely, even for gaming. (The exception is the company-issued laptop, where Windows is, if unneeded and unwanted, still mandatory. I keep in a shame-ghetto in the corner.)
As far as results, what I have gotten into so far:
- The keyboard’s great, by laptop keyboard standards. There’s a decent amount of travel here. Even the full-height arrow keys are found by my fingers reliably, which was not the case for me on previous keyboards with this layout.
- I wasn’t able to get the touchpad to track in a way I found tolerable using libinput, fell back to synaptics, and it’s… tolerable. I use tap-to-click and it’s alright, I’d say mildly unpleasant, mainly for lack of precision in small movements – say I’m trying to move one pixel left so I can grab the handle to resize a window – the movement is fiddly and awkard. Palm rejection isn’t 100%. Maybe I need to tweak the settings more.
- I like the laptop’s form factor a lot more than I thought I would. The screen is as small as it could be while still being comfortably large enough for work. The extra height really helps. The laptop’s light weight and size make it feel very… maneuverable. If I’m reading I’ll catch myself leaning back in my chair and picking the thing up like a tablet. I’m a big fan.
- Battery life is mediocre, but fine, not a point of contention for me.
- Support for charging from any old USB-C charger is a glorious luxury.
- Standby performance is bad. The laptop burns a lot of power while sleeping even in the best case. As far as I can gather, the entire computer industry is an abject failure at putting laptops to sleep and waking them up again, everywhere other than Apple.
- The expansion cards’ using extra power is a disappointment. I’m hoping when Framework’s more established they can go to whatever extremes are necessary to make expansion card power usage negligable in all cases. As it stands, this is basically a USB-C-only laptop, and I’d really like 1 or 2 USB-A ports, maybe that Micro SD card slot, and I suspect that’ll remain true the next 10 years.
- Linux doesn’t have color management to speak of. Narrower-gamut displays are fine, but wider-gamut displays look terrible, neon greens and oranges, blown out reds, that sort of thing. I haven’t spent much time trying to find ways to ameliorate the problem yet.
- The speakers are terrible. I don’t even like listening to voice-only audio, and I’d rather play static through them than music.
- I really appreciate the hardware switches for camera and microphone. I don’t worry too much about being on the receiving end of post-exploitation scenarios, but those switches belong where they are. It’s nice to see them.
- Fingers crossed, knock on wood, one or another kernel update seems to have made this Framework laptop reliably connect to this 5K LG Thunderbolt display I’ve got (at 4K, but 4K is alright with my eyesight and viewing distance).
- Running Steam in a Flatpak is neat, works flawlessly in my experience. I’m going to try running it in LXC next.
- This is more Linux than Framework, but LibreOffice Calc is underwhelming coming from Excel. It’ll probably get the job done for very basic things, but if I needed to do much spreadsheet work I’d look into running Excel in Wine.
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Not sure if it is relevant, but Valve just brought HDR support to Linux when launching the Steam Deck OLED. Is it related?
That is my finding as well. I have a spreadsheet that has a significant amout of VBA behind the scenes to update various sheets when an entry is made on one sheet, and there are significant holes in the VBA support in Libre. So I am looking at running Excel in wine as well. I don’t know how well it runs, if at all though. I do have an old machine onto which I have put Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with wine, but haven’t got around to trying MS Office yet.
I also have a number of other MS centric programs that I will be looking to run under Wine as well, so will be experimenting with those as well to get up to speed with them before my FW16 arrives.
It does look related, but Valve’s work is (probably?) necessary but insufficient to solve the thing I’m complaining about.
Maybe someone else can correct me if I’m wrong.
“HDR” is a heavily overloaded term, and depending on context it can mean almost anything. I usually take it to be talking about the range between the darkest and lightest parts of an image, independent of color (it sounds like Valve’s work is to support some standard or other that includes something to do with color gamuts, but you’d still need software to be smart about which gamuts it’s working with on top of that…). Anyways, I’m talking more about how wide color spaces are, vs. how wide they’re assumed to be by different layers of software between a photo in a web browser and your eyes.
For the longest time, the sRGB color space was considered the “default” for computers. The range of colors that is capable of representing is a lot smaller than what humans are capable of perceiving.
So computer screens could only get a certain level of saturated. In practice, historically, screens most people actually had access to were only capable of displaying some lesser fraction of even sRGB, so everything was always washed out, and people with an interest mostly accounted for that to some extent.
Just lately, the past several years, screens have gotten a lot more capable, moving past the constraints of sRGB into ever-broader color spaces. Without all of the layers of software knowing what color space they’re in, though, relative to your computer monitor, there’s no mapping to say that a given image’s “green” is the same “green” you’ll see with your eyes. Non-managed colors are represented as 0-100% red, green, and blue channels (handwaving/oversimplifying), without defining what 0% and 100% are. Also, the lines between those extremes isn’t linear.
Net effect, on a wide gamut monitor, depending on software, things can be kind of neon-colored. The old assumption would have been that say, green maxes out at 10 and red maxes out at 9, and now it’s 13 and 11. A little bit of oversaturaturation can feel nice, but depending on your tendency to notice it, it can get annoying and garish pretty quickly.
The Framework 16’s screen is advertised as 100% DCI-P3, which is pretty wide by yesterday’s standards, and good and respectable by today’s, but software hasn’t caught up yet. If I could have configured it with an sRGB screen instead, I would have, even getting worse colors, just to ignore the issue for another five years.
My goal with the Framework 16 (beyond having the ability to repair or upgrade when I need/want) is to make the switch to Linux as my daily. I already have a Ryzen-based mini PC operating in this way that I use as a personal cloud and Steam box. My experience getting that running earlier this year has hopefully prepared me for a life without Windows (except on my work-provided laptop, where I don’t have a choice).
I am also already thinking ahead to replacing that same mini PC with the mainboard from my FW16. I am hoping that there is a similar case released as was done for FW13. As long as Framework is successful enough to stick around (and hopefully my plans help in a small way with that), I hope to have a pretty good upgrade cycle going between my laptop and mini PC for a long time.
I use my current Framework 13 for work in the legal sector (BYOD outfit), and I would’ve thought that basically anything would be overkill for just running Office apps. But I’ve actually been surprised by how much the discovery process has dumped huge piles of documents and files that need OCR and indexing and even just… Windows copying a Mac user folder and its 100,000 small files gets wild. Like, “takes 24 hours” wild.
So I’m grabbing the FW16 because of the CPU. I’m not even getting the GPU (yet). Bursty or single-threaded workloads, Intel CPUs are fine, but if you’re actually doing heavy lifting, Intel just can’t do the job in a laptop power envelope.
My home desktop is a lightly hot-clocked Ryzen 7 5700X and I expect the 7840HS to match it easily, likely exceed it. The i5-1240P in my FW13 just chugs in comparison under an all-core load.
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- Writing my novel
- Game dev
- Photo/video editing
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edited for emphasis, as this is the freaking truth and i have to emphasize it strongly. chromebooks come close to mac os for standby… but at the cost of having bewilderingly slow wake-up responsiveness (wifi sometimes took 40-60 seconds(!!!) to recover from sleep), and… uh. everything wrong with chrome os. which is a lot. i spent most of a year suffering to try to pay out via sunk cost fallacy with a ‘high end’ chromebook, and that worked exactly well as sunk cost fallacy ever does.
on the actual thread’s topic…
my use case is being mostly bedridden, i want something that can do my workloads (software development, a fair number of virtual machine configs, some gaming, etc) while still being something i can cart off if i manage to have a good health day and want to do something somewhere other than the bed. so something shy of a desktop replacement (which would be too heavy for me to haul around) seems like a good fit.
i’ve tried remoting, and found it miserable for a lot of usage patterns esp with my constraint of refusing to use a service that requires bouncing off the internet. i considered putting a desktop by the bed and just using a monitor arm, but that felt too much like giving up on the ABILITY to compute elsewhere. of course, the fw16 itself is slightly too heavy for me on bad days, soo i got a vesa mount arm installed anyway, and put a laptop tray on it. testing it out with an old restored macbook pro (it’s 2kg, which is lighter, but still close enough to be relevant), and that’s looking optimistic.
so now i just need to wait out the time for my batch 15 order to get fulfilled.
build selection, for the curious: 7940HS, i hope to shove a 2x48 ram kit in it if we get some more confirmation on reliability for kits i can actually source (i know some fw13 folks are using them, but kit availability is weird, but i’ve got time before it becomes, well, timely), and like the OP, i plan on a 990 pro for storage. haven’t sold myself on 4 TB yet, but it seems likely. at the moment i don’t have a gpu selected… i’m pretty sure the 780M will meet my needs (my gaming is mostly on a steam deck, which is lower clocked and only 2/3rds the gpu cores, and it makes me plenty happy as it is), but if i decide otherwise, i can always order one in a future, or get an egpu.
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