Coder Radio listeners will know that I love to do little techie weekend projects with my son and this past weekend we hit the jackpot with the Framework 13. We had a wonderful experience of building the Framework from its component parts and setting up desktop Linux on the OS-less machine. Here’s some quick thoughts on that assembly experience and the hardware itself. Please note, I will have subsequent content forthcoming on the software-side of things in the coming weeks. TLDR: if you have a kid around 9 or 10, this is a great bonding project and you should consider it.
The unit overall has great build quality though I am experiencing a slightly looser left front foot on the underside of the laptop; it’s nowhere near unusable and I have to actually try to jiggle it to notice the difference. Hardware-wise the screen at it’s 2.8K really hits the sweet spot for most modern Linux distributions. The keyboard by no means has the satisfying tactile click of say a mechanical keyboard with cherry switches, but as laptops go, the keys have a nice amount of travel. The track-pad has been a pleasant surprise. Being a a long-time Mac user, I’m routinely disappointed by other PC makers’ sub-par track-pads. This is not the case with Framework. The track-pad both feels great to use and is responsive. Battery life has been acceptable; it’s definitely not touching Apple numbers for sure. There has been no noticeable fan noise in normal use.
The building experience took roughly 15 to 20 minutes and was an incredibly enjoyable and educational experience for my son and I. It was really amazing watching him start to grok what the difference between say RAM and an HD are at his young age all while being able to actually insert the components himself with some minimal paternal assistance. If you have a technically inclined kid of the right age and are interested in getting him or her a PC of their own, I’d strongly recommenced that you consider the Framework 13; for our Star Wars fans, the experience of watching a nine-year-old assemble his own unit is very reminiscent of a Padawan assembling his own light-saber.
Once you’ve built the unit the practical hardware edge that the laptop has are its swappable expansion cards. Going in, I knew intellectually that this would be a power feature, but it wasn’t until I used it for a few days and had to take it out and about that it really clicked with me. For example, working from home, the HDMI port is incredibly important to me, so I keep a card in for that, but when I’m on the road I might have different needs; in this real-world case it was needing USB-A to get a data backup from a client, but I can see plenty of other cases, such as the occasional need for SD card support. This added flexibility to just keep a few cards in my bag really adds to the overall versatility of the unit.
In the coming weeks, I am going to have more to come on the Framework and the overall experience of living in a desktop Linux (is it finally that year?) from the perspective of an experienced developer. One note of caution, I am running Ubuntu Linux 25.04 right now. That is not as of the date of publication officially supported on my particular configuration and I did have to do a little bit of command-line-fu to get the MediaTek Wifi adapter to work properly. If you want a more no muss no fuss out of the box experience, checkout Bazzite, NixOS or Fedora; these recommendations came to me from Framework support. With that all said, once I fixed the wifi issue, Ubuntu is working just fine for me and once it gets the kernel upgrade to 6.15, I imagine Ubuntu will also just work out of the box. Tune in next week for more on the software stack that I’m currently running and if you need any development or ETL work handled, drop me a line at Alice.
