Lenovo has been weird for many years now with their built-to-order configuration options. They often announce 4 to 5 display options when in reality maybe 2 or 3 are available, and some of them only in combination with some weird other configuration options. Then it also depends on country of order.
Oh yeah, looking forward to hopefully many years of platform support. They’ll obviously have to switch to different memory modules (as an example) at some point (CAMM should be next), but I hope they keep the board compatible with the case, modules, I/O and display for as long as anyhow possible.
I’m coming from a ThinkPad T490 and if that would’ve been a Framework which I could just upgrade from the i7 8565u to a Core Ultra or Ryzen 7000, I wouldn’t need/want a new notebook and could simply upgrade.
This will be my first Framework, already preordered a few weeks ago.
They finally offer a 120 Hz display, and while it has slightly rounded corners which isn’t ideal, but I’ll take the 120 Hz with VRR and higher resolution over perfect corners. They explained they had to use a panel that was already on the market because they don’t have enough volume that they can afford to order a custom display and with the Framework 13 using a 3:2 aspect ratio options were apparently very limited.
They also offer a keyboard with the Super key having a neutral label (not a Windows logo) now.
The new webcam is apparently quite a lot better, but I don’t care too much about that.
I went for the i5 125H model, I think the difference of almost 400,-€ to the i7 155H isn’t worth it for most use cases, as you only get 2 more P cores (with all other core clusters being identical, I think 4+8+2 vs. 6+8+2) and 8 instead of 7 GPU CUs. I feel the difference will be negligible for my use case as soon as it hits power/thermal limits anyway. This also seems to be the stop-gap generation of CPUs, with both AMD and Intel appearing to make noticeable steps forward in the generation.
There’s also the AMD model which is great and got most upgrades the Ultra model did (new display, webcam and keyboard options), only missing out on a slightly improved cooling system. Between the i7 and R7 I probably would’ve gone for the Ryzen 7, but I feel the i5 is the better choice compared to the Ryzen 5, primarily because the iGPU is stripped quite a bit compared to the R7. Intel is also less restrictive on which expansion slot supports what, with every port supporting full USB 4 including DisplayPort. Not a big deal as there are still enough fully-featured slots on the AMD model, but it’s a bit more convenient to just plug in any card anywhere and it works.
Android users would use RCS for communicating with each other via the default messaging app on Android.
MMS has a hard size limit depending on the carrier the sender uses, that’s independent of the sender using an Android phone or an iPhone. This limit can be as high as “more than 1 MB”, but also as low as 300 KB or even less. Compressing an image down to 300 KB will naturally incur a quality penalty.
About “Security theater”: you can enable what’s called “Advanced Data Protection” so the encryption keys are only stored on-device for most types of data including photos, backups and also notes for example. Mail and calendar is one exception that comes to mind, but you could also always use a different mail and calendar service. This is a fairly recent feature, so you may have missed it. Sure, it’s not your fully self-hosted “cloud” on which you can audit every single line of code and whatnot, but it might actually be the best “compromise” of ease-of-use vs. privacy for many people outside the tech bubble we’re in in this community.
About “Proprietary App Store”: the store itself and many apps on there are proprietary, but there are a lot of open source apps on the App Store as well. The bigger problem is the fact that the App Store is the only (hassle-free) way to install apps to the iPhone and only recently the EU seems to change that with alternative storefronts now emerging, but Apple is limiting the use of them to the EU, so they’re essentially doing the bare minimum to comply with EU law.
About “Gaslighting their customers”: I’d like to see hard proof on that. I think what you’re talking about is the fact that messages sent to Android users using the default “Messages” app are sent as MMS, which is an ancient technology and as such only support tiny, low-quality images. Android doesn’t support iMessage and Apple seems to like to keep it that way as it’s apparently selling a lot of iPhones this way in the US (and sure, I agree that’s a bad thing). It does get better with the just-announced RCS support (a supposedly open protocol which Google added so many proprietary extensions to you can’t really call it open anymore) so pictures can be send in full quality to Android users using the Messages app. Also, you could always use a third-party messenger like Signal or WhatsApp and send full-quality pictures just fine.
I’m not saying there aren’t any concerns, but some of the information you provided is at least out of date.
If by backup notebook you mean a notebook that you use in case your main notebook breaks or something similar, I’d install the same OS and software on it.
If by backup notebook you mean that you want to use it as a server where you store backups on, I’d use either Debian or AlmaLinux.
Ironically SDDM itself still runs on X11 afaik, Wayland support is still experimental.
Yeah that difference in configuration definitely makes it so much better, it completely outweighs the fact that Wayland does proper multi-monitor VRR, fractional scaling, HDR and much more.
Oh, I didn’t know that button existed. Great! Even though I just tried it and it didn’t apply my rotation settings correctly.
This is SDDM, the default login manager used by KDE.
The Arch Wiki has an article about it, look under section 2.6.
- Microsoft Recall
The effect of that would be next to none. It’s all about OEM preinstalls. >95% of people never install an OS on their devices themselves. They use whatever is on it. iPhones come with iOS, Samsung phones come with their specific version of Android, and in >99.9% of cases it stays that way. You wouldn’t even see the tiny amount of people installing, say, GrapheneOS on their Google Pixel.
It’s similar with laptops or desktops: Windows is preinstalled on most of them, so that’s what people use. The only other relevant OS in terms of OEM preinstalls is macOS. Heck, most people don’t even know the manufacturer of their laptop unless it’s a MacBook. It’s either a MacBook or an “Apple” or it’s simply a “laptop”.
There are some OEMs (Lenovo and Dell come to mind) offering Ubuntu or maybe Fedora preinstalled on some of their models, but I never saw it listed as the default option.
The best way to get people to use Linux is to preinstall it on a device people want to use. A very recent example of this is the Steam Deck. Most users don’t care or probably don’t even know it runs Linux, it just does what they want it to do. Most people likely don’t know their Chromebook runs Linux, or their Android phone (that they call a “Samsung phone”, not an “Android phone”).
These are hardly surprisingly high System requirements, at least if the game looks the part. Achieving 1080p60 at medium settings on an RTX 2080, which performs pretty much on par with an even older flagship card (1080 Ti) sounds about right.
CPU requirements aren’t that out of place either, and I doubt you’ll actually need a 14900K for 60 FPS.
Intel Thread Director has been backported to Windows 10, and it wouldn’t affect AMD CPUs anyway. Windows 10 has shown slightly better performance in games compared to Windows 11 in many tests.
Try Fedora or another distro with nearly-up-to-date kernel + KDE Plasma, the latter has a GUI for configuring power management separate for AC, battery and low battery. It even includes features like a charge percentage limit.
KDE’s file manager Dolphin doesn’t remember SMB passwords unless you tell it to.
For MS Office compatibility try OnlyOffice.
My brand new Razer Viper V3 Pro that releases in April 2024 works great under Linux. Not sure why your Logitech stuff doesn’t.
Your quote is interesting, because it’s the number one point for me when choosing an operating system: get out of my way, I want to get stuff done on the operating system, not tinker with it. So Windows it was for me, and I really held on to it for a long time, even using the LTSC version because it was less bloated and annoying. Some day, an update even started these nags in my LTSC installation and eventually it was at a point where Windows was more in my way and I had to do more tinkering to move it out of my way than just using a solid Linux distro, where yes, I had to tinker quite a bit to get everything working perfectly, but at least once its set up, it won’t suddenly come around on the next restart and says “HEY I MADE EDGE YOUR DEFAULT BROWSER NICE RIGHT? WANT TO USE ONEDRIVE AND MICROSOFT REWARDS? OH AND LOOK CANDY CRUSH IS BACK. AND THESE NICE MICROSOFT NEWS IN THE TASKBAR.” - this to me is just straight up disrespectful to the user.
No OS is perfect and I won’t pretend Linux is, but it got to a point where it is less annoying and cumbersome.
Your best bet when it comes to USB-C docks is using a computer with a Thunderbolt 4 port. While I’m not 100 % sure, I think one of the few spec changes comparing Thunderbolt 4 to 3 is that TB4 certification requires two independent DisplayPort streams. If you can then find a Thunderbolt 4 certified Dock with either two independent DisplayPort outputs or even two Thunderbolt outputs (physically USB-C), you can connect your monitors via DP to DP or USB-C to DP. This configuration should work on pretty much any OS as long as Thunderbolt is working properly.
USB 4 or Thunderbolt 3 can support multiple DisplayPort streams, but it’s often hard to find exact specifications on what’s supported with which computer and dock. Many docks have multiple DisplayPort ports, but they are linked via MST (essentially daisy-chaining) so they share a single DisplayPort stream. This tends to work fine under Windows as long as you don’t run into bandwidth limitations, and I think Linux supports it as well, but this might vary by distro. I know macOS does not support MST at all.
Even worse than that, a lot of the cheaper (but also more expensive) multi-display USB-C docks use DisplayLink, a proprietary technology that essentially uses software rendering to output to multiple displays. This requires a proprietary driver to get working, so I’m not sure how well it works under Linux if at all.
Your best bet for Linux is to run Wayland and an up-to-date kernel (we’re currently at 6.9.x) with a well-supported DE like KDE or GNOME.
I had an ASRock X570 Taichi once. It had a great feature set, but unfortunately every few cold boots the BIOS would completely forget all settings and reset everything to default. This may have been related to my memory’s XMP profile, but the same memory ran just fine with XMP and the exact same CPU on a much older ASUS X370 Crosshair VI Hero. So I eventually switched to the ASUS ROG Strix B550-E, which was/is a very good board I would say. So naturally, I went with the ASUS ROG Strix B650E-E when I switched to AM5, and while the board is generally stable, the Intel NIC has issues the way ASUS configured it (see my reply to the other commenter).
The GIGABYTE B650E AORUS Master looks quite interesting with its 4 PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe slots. I eventually settled for the ASUS ROG Strix B650E-E though when I got my Ryzen 7000 CPU at the beginning of last year, but if I got to choose again it wouldn’t be an ASUS board.
The mainboard I have is mostly fine (great even, in terms of general stability), but ASUS fucked up their version of the firmware or power management of the Intel 2.5 GbE adapter so it can just completely die after a few hours under Linux, and sometimes get the connection speed wrong under Windows. A workaround under Linux is to disable PCIe power management entirely in the Linux kernel parameters (pcie_aspm.policy=performance pcie_port_pm=off), but that’s hardly ideal. I don’t see myself spending hundreds of dollars on a new mainboard just because of this issue though. ASUS fails to even acknowledge the issue.
Yeah, it’s also not “just” if it’s one of what feels like hundreds of steps now to make the OS somewhat usable.