In September I started a PhD in fungal ecology at Aberystwyth University. This aligning with the end of support for Windows 10 and my old laptop coming up on five years old felt like a good time to invest in a new computer and switch to Linux. I care a lot about the right to repair and modify your own hardware, and so after some research the Framework 13 felt like an appropriate choice. All of the parts can be bought individually and the laptop can be repaired easily at home. It can also be easily upgraded.
Specs
This is a highly customisable laptop. I went for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 model. I got a single DDR5-5600 32GB RAM card and a WD_BLACK SN7100 NVMe M.2 2280 1TB SSD.
Display: 2.8K
System: AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series – Ryzen AI 7 350
32GB RAM
1TB SSD
The cost came to a bit over £1700.
Setup
Setup was easy (with one moderate exception, more on that later), with clear instructions on the Framework website. I put the laptop together, installed Fedora 43 (my new operating system of choice), and got going. All of this was pretty fast and easy.
What is it like to use?
Going from 8GB to 32GB of RAM and a much, much faster processor is an indescribable change. Webpages just load now (!) and it feels like the laptop can handle anything I throw at it. This is particularly useful for me as an ecologist as I regularly analyse large datasets in R and run ecological models in Julia and Python. I don’t game very much so I can’t comment on how it handles computationally intensive games but I have been playing a game called Cassette Beasts recently and have found it to be very smooth. Of course one would expect no less for the price!
I love this laptop.
One thing that I thought could be a bit of a gimmick is the four USB-C expansion card slots. This is an innovation where instead of having many separate slots built into the laptop (USB-A, USB-C, HDMI, etc etc) you simply slot expansion cards (adaptors) into inset slots, where they connect to the mainboard via USB-C. They are then flush with the edge of the laptop so it as if they are built in. This is a fantastic system. You can easily modify the laptop on the fly (even while it is running).
I also ended up shelling out on a 1TB SSD expansion card to use for backing up data. Going from a USB-A external hard drive to this, which acts more like an internal SSD (fast enough to boot an operating system from, according to Framework), was pretty revolutionary. I can now back up my entire laptop (around 110GB of data) in just a few minutes, where in the past it would’ve taken at least thirty.
One issue that was sort of my fault
So as I said I got the DIY version of this laptop. The setup instructions on the website are clear except for one moderate issue. When installing the RAM card it says to put it in slot 0 “on the right” but in my laptop it was on the left. I was unsure what to do so I put it in slot 1, on the right, rather than slot 0. Well, after a few days my laptop started randomly crashing! Not like blue screen of death, I mean it simply went blank, dead, without warning at intervals of maybe ten hours. At one point I had to completely reset the mainboard to get it to turn on again. Anyway after weeks of back and forth with support (this was over the Christmas holidays so they were understandably not always available) it turned out the issue was the RAM card being in the wrong slot. Since then the laptop has run perfectly.
I love Fedora Linux
My last comment is that after going from Windows 10 to Fedora 43 I will never use a for-profit operating system again. Fedora Linux is easy to use, the user interface feels avant garde but also intuitive, it has an attractive aesthetic, and it runs more or less as well as Windows with all of the software I use (with the singular exception of Minecraft, still working on that…). I mostly switched from MS Office to Libre Office before getting my new laptop anyway so losing that has not really been an issue.
Overall rating
I would give this laptop five stars ★★★★★
Of course, it is a premium model and you wouldn’t expect any less. I do think the innovative features make this company one to pay attention to in the future.
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