For those who’re currently looking for a nice new device: shown are (from Top Left to Right):
- NovaCustom (NL)
- Star Labs (UK)
- System76 (US)
- Juno Computers (US)
- UbuntuShop (BE)
- Slimbook (ES)
- Tuxedo Computers (DE)
- Entroware (UK)
- MiniFree (UK)
- Nitrokey (DE)
- Laptops with Linux (NL)
- Purism (US)
Not mentioned but also selling Ready-to-use Linux computer:
- Dell
- Lenovo
Computers are fine yes, but I’m still waiting for a Linux phone with not-shit specs LMAO
The Software isn’t fully there yet for mass adoption (Your mileage may vary, but the general expectations for a modern daily driver are pretty high), at least not for anyone but enthusiasts and developers. If there’s something like a PinePhone 2 it will probably yet again designed to be relatively cheap despite low production volume, so as many potential developers as possible can afford one.
If it can handle my banking app (local credit union) and occasionally play YouTube I’m good tbh
A lot of financial apps require Play Protect and attestation. I had to fight for months to figure out how to spoof the integrity check so I could deposit some stupid checks.
some years ago it really was extremely hard. at least now there’s finally some solid shops.
Does Framework sell a laptop with Linux pre-installed or do they only have officially supported distros?
Me too, and have done it in the past on one laptop that I did get with Linux when there was no bring-your-own option, but I suppose that OP’s got a point — there are people out there for whom installing the OS on a blank laptop is going to be intimidating.
If you’ve installed an OS a zillion times, this is all old hat. If you never have before, probably feels kind of scary.
For those people, having a preinstalled OS can be a significant value-add.
Came to evangelize about our lord and savior used thinkpads
I’m here to evangelize coreboot and Talos and Framework for those with more money than you and I
Talos… are you running kubernetes for your laptop you mad lad? Also, not aware that the coreboot is ready yet for any of the non-chromebook machines. (Edit: meant coreboot for Framework laptops)
I have a framework, not that happy with it. It sometimes fails to find my encrypted partition (many times reinstalled different systems over the years), it heated up to 100°C so fast that it throttled down to 400 MHz all the time. The overheating is better since they sent me a new motherboard, but it still goes to 95 easily and heats up when doing the most basic stuff. I’ve also had some sound issues lately on Debian stable and testing, but not sure about that.
I had a thinkpad for YEARS running various flavours of Debian / Ubuntu. It never had an issue with drivers and even the fingerprint sensor worked out of the box.
The battery was shot to hell, the hinge was gone, it was time to upgrade. So I bought an ideapad. There’s something funky with the audio quality on Linux and the fingerprint scanner is now a face scanner camera. Howdy is not easy to configure and I’m pretty sure I can trick it with a photo.
That’s a long way of me saying I have buyers remorse and not all Lenovos are made equal :(
I still remember the good old IBM Thinkpads, most of them were indestructible tanks. But with Lenovo, those times are long over. My last machine was a TP L390 Yoga. It overheated frequently, the cooling system was inadequate for the 4.6GHz Intel CPU, one day the logo sticker came off because the glue turned into sticky liquid, the passive Micro-Ethernet dongle cost 50€ and the cable turned into glue after a few months…god, what a shit machine this was.
I was able to work with it for a while by limiting and undervolting the CPU, but one day a Windows update came out that disabled the functionality and it worked like crap on Linux for a long time due to bad drivers.
I switched to GPD now. Never going back, although I miss the Trackpoint a little bit.
T and P series is aparently good, normal L is decent, but others are terrible (yoga, x, ideapad, etc.). But I haven’t used TP-s myself. I did use an Ideapad and it’s terrible (no upgradability, falling apart metal chassis (how the hell does metal break), no key-travel (feels like hitting a rock while typing) and it has a shitload of mediatek hardware which is a pain on linux (but I haven’t tested it as it’s my dad’s).
Our experiences seem to differ. I currently have L390 Yoga and it’s the best thing I ever used. The cooling isn’t bad, just the feet are too thin to allow for flipping the screen over. Any cooling pad, or in my case an egg carton fixes this.
Mine has i5-8365U (4.1GHz).
The Ethernet is pretty stupid, but I’ve got the dongle from AliExpress for €9.31 and it’s working fine.
I really love the touchscreen in combination with Arch, KDE Plasma and Wayland. It also has pretty great colors, but I am coming from TN, so the bar was laying on the ground.
Driver-wise, everything works OOB on Arch (at least since September 2024 which is when I got it).
Really, I only have 2 problems with it:
- The proprietary “Ethernet”
- USB-C doesn’t allow charging from C to A cable despite supporting 5V@2.1A charging from any proper USB-C.
As much as I like my Tuxedo, I probably would not have bought it if I had known that the ethernet card and some laptop essentials dont work without their drivers, which have not been upstreamed. Due to this, I can’t use my distro of choice (Bluefin) OR run with secure boot and LUKS with tpm unlock even on regular Fedora
Do you know if that’s still the case on their new systems?
I’m currently waiting for next gen GPUs to become available and have been leaning towards Tuxedo
I’m using an Infinitybook Pro 14 gen 9. It came out last year.
You will most likely need the “tuxedo-drivers” package, but whether you’ll need an ethernet driver too depends on the hardware they choose.
At least they publish their drivers for both RPM and DEB systems, so that makes it a bit less painful.
Of course, none of this applies if you use their distro. There, everything is pre-installed and configured for their laptops
What Ethernet chip do they use?
I’ve got a Framework 16 and all components work on both Fedora and Debian without installing custom drivers, so I’m surprised it’s still an issue for some laptops.
The model that I have uses the motorcomm yt6801 chip. There is apparently some work going on to upstream the driver by the OEM, but it largely stalled with the last comment being from a kernel maintainer 7 months ago
