halfbyte

For a while now, my first generation AMD based Framework 13 has been my daily driver (and still is). I even have two of them at the moment with one being a loaner from a company I'm working for.

I must say, the FW13 is a super nice laptop. It, in my eyes, is the perfect balance between sleekness and maintainability and my own FW13 already has a new screen in it (I wanted to have the higher resolution screen) and I had a broken SSD once. It also has a very nice CPU that might not come super close to the current Apple offerings, but is actually “good enough” in the sense that I can usually get a good day of work out of it if it does not involve super heavy work loads while being quite good at every task I usually throw at it.

Upgrade?

I currently don't plan to upgrade the CPU board to the newer processors as I don't think it would drastically change performance in a way that matters to me.

The thing is, my main workhorse is still a 2019 i7 computer, mostly running Ubuntu and this machine is still “fine” for most of my work. I really want to upgrade it, but I don't really want to make that kind of investment right now. And so, in my office, I have this big box that just chuggs along and then when I work fom home, I use the FW13 with a big monitor.

The 2-in-1

But when I saw the announcement of the FW12 convertible, I couldn't resist. This is not a computer that I need. It is not even a particularly good computer with its slightly older Intel innards.

But it is a fun computer, that's for sure. I can use it almost as a tablet replacement (It is a bit on the heavy side, unfortunately). The plastic case with the TPU lining makes for at least the impression of being indestructible. The colorways are fun (I got the bubblegum colorway).

This is also the first laptop (because it is not one of my main workhorses) where I decided to only install Linux on. Given that it is sort of the main Framework supported distro, and I always wanted to test it, I went with stock Fedora/KDE. I must say, KDE really grew on me – It seems to be better that the Gnome I have used for the last 10 years or so in a couple of key points – Its scaling works much better, especially with multi monitor setups. It seems to generally work better when using Wayland. I also, I think, like its slightly more conservative approach to design language but that is a very subjective thing and I do still think the Gnome team does an amazing job.

For now, the FW12 is kinda my “weekend” computer. It feels a bit frivolous to have so many computers in service, to be fair.

Pen and Paper

One last thing: Given that Framework's Pen still isn't available, I got myself a Metapen M2 which is “fine”. The only real issue I encountered is that the eraser side of the pen does not agree with the paperlike screen protector I installed (As I found the glass surface to be really annoying to write on), it leaves marks (as do the keys, unfortunately, but so far, wiping off these marks is easy. The screen protector I got is a ViaScreens Paper and apart from those marks, I am really happy with the quality and the way the screen looks with it.