Hi everyone, I recently purchased the 13 Laptop and after 2 months of daily driving (work and personal) I’d like to share my experience.
I am a Linux-only user, so a laptop that was upgradable, compatible with my flavor of Linux, had decent compute specs, had AMD processor, 3+ USB-C ports, not crazy expensive and ideally had SecureBoot + TPM were the conditions. Framework 13 met all these conditions and so I gave it a shot.
Specs:
FRANDG0007 Framework Laptop 13 DIY Edition (System: AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840U)
FRANRM0003 DDR5-5600 Capacity: 32GB (1 x 32GB) → Upgraded to 64GB (2 x 32GB)
FRANRYWD0A WD_BLACK™ SN850X NVMe™ Capacity: 1TB
Initial Setup
The directions were fairly straightforward during setup. I had put together plenty of computers before and the Framework laptop was much easier to put together. There was plenty of instructions both with the packaging and online that made it easy to figure out any questions I had. I liked the magnetic lining to the baseboard. I, like many others, had issues with screws stripping; thankfully this didn’t happen until after I was done and was putting the last screw on. I will explain the result of this later.
Installation
I installed core Arch Linux. I was new to Arch (which was quite the joy to learn on its own).
There was nothing particular to the laptop that prevented the installation. There was one unique twist to this laptop that was important: when it came to setup SecureBoot+TPM, when enrolling Secure Boot keys, you should add -f ( -f is for firmware: “include keys indicated by the firmware as being part of the default database”) when using sbctl to enroll the keys (along with the microsoft keys, the -m). This line worked for me:
sbctl enroll-keys -m -f
Thankfully I found this mentioned in a forum post somewhere; there is quite the community of people using it for Linux which made it more helpful for me to diagnose the SecureBoot issue I was having, which is another benefit in and of itself.
Usage
As mentioned I’ve been using my 13 as a daily driver for about 2 months. I enjoy the construction of the 13; slim, portable and sleek. The only hardware issue I’ve had is the stripped screw; just recently I decided to make the 13 my long term dd and figured I’d throw in another 32GB of RAM. But to do that, I needed to get that screw off. Well… that screw was really stripped. I discovered this is a common problem that others have had; there’ve been numerous posts about it. I discovered that there is a way to disconnect the battery at UEFI, and so instead of getting the screw off I simply disconnected the battery at UEFI. Not ideal, and I was certainly aware that I might be pushing it a little. However I managed to lift up the baseboard just enough to slip the RAM stick in and it’s worked fine. I still have not removed the stripped screw, and at this point I hope I won’t have to for a while; and if I need to, I may be able to do the same thing I did already, even though it’s not ideal.
Other than this, the hardware has served me well. I had a minor issue where one of the swappable USB-C did not work even after a reboot, and was not showing up using lspci etc. However I had rebooted a few more times and it eventually did work, so I suspect this was a software issue of some kind, although I am unsure what happened. I really enjoy the swappable USB-C modules, but they are quite hard to press the button to get them off (perhaps this is a good thing? Not sure how else one could design this).
I’ve seen other posts complaining about the battery, but I am always plugged in anyway, and the rare times when I am not I often don’t need it for long anyway, so the battery has been fine for my use case.
Was It Worth It?
All told I’ve spent about ~2K USD, including all the upgradables (RAM, additional swappable USB-C modules, etc) and costs of taxes/shipping etc.
2 months is hard to judge the purchase overall, but so far I’ve been very happy.
Overall
There was one minor hardware issue (probably self caused) that was annoying, but outside of this I’ve been super happy with the 13 and as a dedicated Linux user it’s served me well. There are certainly cheaper laptops out there, but the community, modular design, repairability, Linux-friendliness and overall design have won me over.