You know, I keep hearing people beg for a trackpoint, but if there really was the demand, why hasn't a third party made one already? That's the whole point of Framework, if you want to extend functionality, you can do it yourself without relying on the company to do it.
Now admittedly, I don't use this thing for real work, just messing around when traveling, but a touch screen really is much better than a track pad.
Give me the cool shit, Framework. Gimme a module that's actually a bluetooth mouse. Gimme a module that's just a horizontal stack of like six USB2 ports. Gimme an ethernet port and a serial port.
For someone with a smaller set of peripherals and working mostly mobile, it might be worth it - if they were fine with the non-customizable aspects such as the trackpad and keyboard. But I'm not one of those people.
Though I agree, for a device that's trying to cater to both Thinkpad and Macbook users alike, they're seemingly allergic to all the stupid things people actually pay big money for on those machines.
And the case could have been slightly bigger to allow for novel keyboard designs, including mechanical keys with better travel or a trackpoint. The framework has been out for a year and nobody has released a third party keyboard that is materially different.
Only thing that was a "deal breaker" was the camera though, it just doesn't cut it for what we expect these days.
I installed a Crucial P5 SSD in mine, and it caused Linux to crash on waking from sleep. I switched to a different brand and now it's fine. There are several mentions of this problem in the Framework forums, and one of them is from me.
The battery life is not great. I haven't run Windows on the laptop to compare, but I've heard Linux is less good at managing laptop battery life.
What frustrates me the most is that Gnome and KDE have no way to control the trackpad scroll speed under Wayland! Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed. It's a really weird thing to have missing from a desktop environment in 2022 and the default speed is annoyingly high.
KDE also still does not support the fingerprint reader for logging in. Apparently this has been a known issue for years.
The two major downsides of this device in my opinion: - the battery life is terrible. If I'm on a video call not plugged in the battery lasts 2h at most and doing basic work (writing on Notion, using Slack, etc) it's at most 5h. Compared to my coworkers with M1 laptops it's just terrible. - the CPU and device gets way too hot without even doing much. I can't recommend a Framework laptop if you intend to type on it, I can't see myself using it to work without an external keyboard. Also, when I'm on a video call the CPU fan is spinning fast which is annoying.
For video calls I'm usually plugging a Logitech thing via USB-C which acts as a webcam, a microphone and an external monitor (which is a TV for me). This works surprisingly well. Sometimes I use a simple USB-A microphone and my laptop webcam, which also works. Right now with Fedora 37 beta I can't use my bluetooth headphones because something crashes with pipewire.
When the laptop is plugged into the LG monitor everything works fine and it's basically a workstation at this point. It's fast enough for what I do which is Go and Java mainly (I have a 1165G7, 32G of RAM and 1TB of SSD).
One annoying thing with an external monitor is that _something_ causes Gnome to move my windows to random workspaces when I unlock Gnome. I have no idea why; it doesn't happen when I'm not plugged in.
If you have more specific questions I'd be happy to answer.
Aside from that I'm currently doing TB4 with a Caldigit TS4 dock and putting out over a single cable 2.5GbE, USB3, two displays (1920x1080@60Hz HDMI, and 5120x1440@120Hz DP) and charging the laptop without any issues at all from linux itself.
I did end up going to 5.18 and above kernels for some better linux intel alder-lake tuning/tweaks but it wasn't strictly necessary. You will probably need the binary blob for the intel wifi 6 adapter, not entirely sure I had it from my old laptop already.
The screen resolution is a little weird, but nothing has had any trouble with it.
Edited to add: I've got the 2nd gen laptop with an i7-1280p and 64gb of ram.
Overall, coming from linux on older thinkpads I wasn't used to kernel regressions like that, but this is my first time using linux on brand new hardware, too.
Using it as my daily work computer.
So far their advice is just to try the same thing but longer, though.
A dedicated GPU is another missing feature for me. I'm hoping with how powerful iGPU are becoming (amd 7000 looks promising) this should be a non issue hopefully by next purchase.
I totally understand where you are coming from though, as I really was in the same boat. YMMV, of course.
Edit: Mobile - Grammar/Spelling Adjustments.
