A few months back (in September), I finally received a new laptop computer, that I’d ordered last year. I’d ordered it so far in advance because the laptop is made by a new company that is making an effort to sell open source laptops that come “bare” (without operating systems installed). That company is called framework (link). I thought it was such a cool idea that, given that I was hoping to buy a new laptop anyway, I went to the effort to pre-order.
My last two laptops have both been lemons. There was the “XNote” – a South Korean domestic brand, which was just a piece of garbage running windows 7. And there was the rather pricey HP laptop I got right upon returning to the US in 2018, that had several disappointing issues (including a useless battery and having Windows 10 installed on it, which is a tautologically defective operating system). HP specifically managed to make the warranty service so arduous as to effectively prevent me from availing myself of it, so I was stuck with it. I’ve been using it, these past years, as a desktop (hence always plugged in, and therefore without any need for its broken battery). I reformatted the harddrive and put Ubuntu linux on it, and it runs fine, such as it is. But for what I paid, it remains an intense regret.
So I was in the market for a laptop, I guess. But it was in the back of my mind and a low priority. For financial reasons, too.
But this framework idea appealed to me. I have strong feelings about “open source” and “right to repair”, and this new company seemed committed to these principles.
I received the laptop with some internals uninstalled – so it was up to me to put it together: a kind of faux-“kit” computer. Here are some pictures. I installed the “hard drive” (actually solid state), the memory. The CPU and wifi were already in. I added some little plug-in doo-dads that make up the external plugs for it.
Once it was all together, I stuck in a USB stick with a Linux install ISO on it, and installed Ubuntu and got it working the way I like.
I held off reviewing it because once it was all set up, I didn’t use it very intensively for the following few months. But during my travels down south, last month, I got to use it quite intensively, and it proved 100% reliable and without disappointment. That’s the first computer in a decade and a half that I can say that about (“knock on wood”).
Here it is yesterday running some updates (at command prompt screen, of course). I like linux because I get to completely control that.
