Hello fellows,
I’m currently looking in 13-14" laptops with no immediate needs for one but just because it’s exciting. I love my Dell XPS but I feel I should support companies with which I share more common views. I could make the effort to go a with a less attractive look (especially for bezels) but I don’t want to go wrong with hardware so what are your thoughts on Framework, Starlab, Purism, and System76? I’ll be running Arch and I tend to have a preference for Framework for now.
Do you have feedback (positive and negative) to share on any of these companies?
Thanks for the knowledge you’ll bring me. That’ll be extremely useful when time comes to go with a new machine.
Update 1: Still wonderful to be part of such a great community. Thanks for all the great feedback (looking for more :) ).
So far everyone is standing behind Framework. Anyone with a less positive experience or who would like to speak for the other companies?
Update 2: Thank you fellows for the time you’ve spent to share your honest feedback! I didn’t want to influence your inputs but you all confirmed the Framework picture I had in mind. It’s a piece of mind to read real world experience so thanks again. I was surprised to not see the system76 community speaks louder. Anyway, when time comes I will (virtually) push Framework shop’s door.
I’ve had a framework for 2 years now. It’s run fedora, manjaro (arch based) and Debian with no major issues. Manjaro had some problems with KDE and the high DPI screen. Sometimes the scaling was inconsistent between apps. Fedora just works.
Only hardware issue is the battery life is just not that great. And the trackpad doesn’t always work property, but I think that was a first generation issue that’s been resolved since.
Thank you for taking time to share this detailed feedback. Very useful!
Don’t know if you plan to use another Arch-based distro on this laptop in the future but I came across this page which has some tips to adjust the Framework 13 including one that may be related to what you mention. They recommend to use 1,5 scaling factor. More details can be found here.