- 255
- IGN
- videogamesm12
In preparation for an upcoming trip which necessitated a decent gaming laptop, I decided to go long-term and purchase a Framework Laptop 16 instead of an MSI or ASUS gaming laptop which is bound to experience an unrepairable nuclear meltdown one day. As someone who has favored easily repairable electronics, I had been keeping tabs on Framework since at least 2021, which promised to offer easily repairable and even upgradable high-end laptops - a novel concept especially for a modern laptop company. With the zero-bullshit iFixIt guides regarding the computers, the praises from the likes of Louis Rossmann (a major figure in the right to repair movement), and the positive feedback from people I know who had the previous generation, I felt confident in investing in the computer even if it meant paying a hefty price upfront. I chose to get the lower-end but still respectable Ryzen 7 7840HS CPU, 32 GB of RAM, a 1 TB SSD, and the optional Radeon RX 7700S discrete GPU upgrade.
Since this computer is literally brand new, these are my first impressions with it. The perks and quirks of the computer haven't fully unraveled yet, so I may update this thread in the future detailing my experiences with it a few weeks or even months from now. For the time being though, enjoy this lengthy thread detailing my adventures with it.
Because I wanted to save some money, I decided to get the DIY edition of the laptop. In this state, the computer comes in semi-assembled with the exception of the keyboard, screen bezel, memory, and storage. It instructs you to scan a QR code on the "fabric" that the computer comes in to get assembly instructions. The instructions explain the step-by-step each process of how to assemble the computer like how to install the RAM and SSD, making it easy to follow. If you don't have a screwdriver, you don't have to worry since the computer also comes with one, almost encouraging you to open it up and see what's under the hood. The parts you need to install are put in easy to reach places that are clearly marked. In the process of assembling the computer, it also familiarizes you with its internals and how to remove and install commonly replaced components so in the future you can continue to maintain it, sort of like a car.
Overall, it was very easy to take apart and put back together and it didn't take very long for me to get it booting into the BIOS. It took a little bit to calibrate the memory, but soon I got a message box saying that there was nothing to boot from (as to be expected).
First, it was the matter of finding and getting the installation media to work - I somehow lost the flash drive and even the DVD that I had to install my operating systems, so I spent an ungodly amount of time searching for the flash drive I had installed Ventoy on and eventually managed to find it. My troubles weren't over however as the flash drive really did not want to cooperate as even though I copied the LTSC 2021 ISO from my main computer to it, the fucking piece of shit would hang whenever I'd try to properly unmount it. When I said fuck it and yanked it from my desktop's USB port and tried to boot into the ISO on the laptop, it failed to boot due to some corrupt BCD bullshit. Oh boy. Luckily for me, I had a copy of LTSC 2019 already on the flash drive and wasn't corrupted to high hell and could actually boot, so I just installed that first. Windows booted and installed perfectly, and even recognized and autometically set the DPI settings for my laptop's screen so that text was actually legible. That was the first hurdle out of the way, but we are far from done.
The second hurdle was upgrading from LTSC 2019 to LTSC 2021. Although LTSC 2019 was workable in its current state, there were no drivers for my trackpad and Wi-Fi card, and I never planned on using that build of Windows on that computer anyways. Since I couldn't find a way to boot into the LTSC 2021 setup directly, I resorted to upgrading the builds by mounting the ISO (a really convenient feature that was introduced in Windows at some point) and running the setup from there. The problem is that all of my USB flash drives were either too small or was fucking retarded and didn't want to cooperate either (usually hanging on some other bullshit like copying the ISO from my computer to it and then being unable to unmount the drive in question), so out of sheer frustration I grabbed a 500 GB external HDD from a decade ago and copied the ISO onto that and plugged it in. It unironically worked better than the more modern flash drives that I had been trying to use, and soon I was running LTSC 2021, which had drivers for my trackpad but still nothing for my Wi-Fi card. With that hurdle over with, I soon encountered another one and this one was agonizing, to say the least.
The final hurdle was the internet, which is something I absolutely needed to really get everything up and running. This hurdle was two-pronged - my computer still didn't have any Wi-Fi drivers that I could use and my ISP decided to be absolutely fucking retarded and took my internet offline for several hours of maintenance. As such, I had to use USB tethering on my phone to get online, but even that was unreliable as download speeds were nowhere near the luxurious speeds I had with my home internet, and that became a problem when I needed to install drivers and updates. I wanted to install drivers directly from the Device Manager but was redirected to Windows Update, which was absolutely unhelpful for getting anything beyond SMBus drivers. Windows seemed to think that I was in immediate danger of being hacked and thus prioritized updates over drivers, and while I might have been in retrospect, that still didn't excuse delaying necessary drivers which very well might have improved performance greatly. I tried using Snappy Driver Installer Origin as I had heard decent things about it, but soon learned that the way it works is that it downloads gargantuan driver packs with the hope being that your drivers are included in that, and with the absolutely abysmal download speeds I had to put up with I estimated that I could grow a full beard and complete a marathon from California to New York and back before it would finish downloading, so back to the drawing board I went. I soon learned that Framework had a dedicated driver pack for their laptops on their website which was only 832 MB in size, and after fighting multiple interruptions in my internet connection, I was finally able to install drivers for pretty much every piece of hardware in the computer.
With updates and drivers installed, it was smooth sailing from there. With proper graphics drivers installed, everything felt butter smooth. I installed some games like Minecraft, Doom 2016, and Skyrim to test its gaming performance compared to my main computer and it ran them smoothly, no problem. I soon started tweaking and customizing the shit out of my Windows installation to make it look more like Windows 7 (complete with the glossy Aero taskbar with StartIsBack++, transparent windows with DWMBlurGlass, and a proper Windows 7 theme called Aero10) and trying to make it look as decent as possible, and that's the stage I'm at now with Windows. Everything runs smoothly and I couldn't be happier.
The duality of man
After reaching the desktop and picking one of the extreme settings so things were at least be somewhat usable without having a functional dartboard that you can practice from space, I soon installed other desktop environments to see how they look and how they would fare against the accursed high DPI scale problem. I kept GNOME installed because I needed a good reliable fallback desktop environment in case things went tits-up.
Here's a bit of backstory. The first time I tried to experience it was in 2020, where the panels stopped working and soon afterwards the entire desktop environment just stopped working completely. Things were definitely more stable the second time around in 2022/2023 but I always noticed distracting instances of "micro stutter" whenever I was playing games like Minecraft or Doom Eternal which for some reason wasn't reflected in the games' FPS counters. Waking the computer up from sleep mode usually caused at least some form of instability which ranged from the Wallpaper Engine background plugin freezing and crashing to a complete lockup of the desktop environment requiring a forced reboot to get things working again.
With the laptop's hardware and Linux distribution being officially supported by Framework, I decided to give it a try. It automatically recognized my display and set the display scale to 150%, so everything actually scaled as I would have expected. Everything was pretty smooth, though I wasn't a fan of the default look so I attempted to install some themes that looked nice and that's when I encountered my first issue. Whenever I installed new themes (e.g. color schemes, window decorations, global themes, etc), the System Settings application for whatever reason would disappear and then when I would go to try to open it again, nothing would happen. Even running it from the command-line gave me absolutely nothing helpful. I looked the issue up and found a post on Reddit detailing a problem similar to mine and it turns out that for whatever reason, the program was still running in the background but nothing was actually displaying. Killing it and starting it again fixed the problem, but what the fuck? I also encountered numerous miscellaneous stability issues with KDE applications where they would randomly crash for no reason. Eventually, I got it to work but I couldn't figure out how to make my taskbar panel transparent - every time I set the panel to be "translucent" it would have absolutely zero effect whatsoever. I still haven't figured this out.
Why is it such a hassle to get a black taskbar in modern operating systems?
Feeling less confident about the stability of Plasma now that I had run into issues that really should not be issues, I moved on to less eye candy but supposedly more reliable desktop environments.
It didn't detect my monitor's DPI scaling so everything defaulted to the 100% scaling level, which was inconvenient to read. In addition, the "Scale" option in the Display settings in XFCE was deceptive and misleading - setting the scale to 2x made UI elements smaller instead of bigger and trying to set the scale to a decimal value only gave me a single decimal point and even then it still looked like shit. It turns out that for it to scale up as I expected while still looking decent, I needed to set the Window Scaling option in the Appearance settings, and even then I was faced with the same bullshit choice of two extremes: smaller than a gnat's dick or suitable for an ant colony. Worse yet, increasing the scale without first enabling the option to set matching XFWM themes in the Styles tab (something which is completely unrelated) doesn't scale up any of the window decorations so the window itself would be astronomical but reaching the title bar and buttons would be like trying to stick your dick into a Cheerio. Furthermore, the mouse cursor also doesn't scale up automatically so you have to separately go into the mouse settings and increase the cursor size manually. In addition, many window manager themes do not support high DPI scaling if at all, so I was facing a small selection of themes that actually looked good with my display out of an already limited selection of themes that actually looked good in general.
This went from 1 to 11 very quickly
This experience was inconvenient and disappointing. Researching the issue seemed to show that Linux desktop environments have a really hard time scaling UI elements up correctly and the solution suggested by some people online, I shit you not, was to reduce the screen resolution. The problem with this solution is that everything looks like fucking shit when you use a lower resolution on monitors like this. XFCE just isn't an option, so I had to ditch it.
This was the last one I tried before just giving up outright and rebooting into Windows. Linux ran great and I'm sure it would have gamed well, but I found it increasingly frustrating that out of the 4 desktop environments I used, only 1 of them was actually capable of properly adapting to my high resolution screen. That's not great. Sure, maybe you could set some environment variables on startup to instruct the various different libraries to scale as you wish, but this can only get you so far and that's a really inconvenient and hacky thing to have to do just for your desktop to actually look usable on the built-in monitor. Fucking hell.
Here's hoping my experience will be as good as it is now 6 months from now.
Since this computer is literally brand new, these are my first impressions with it. The perks and quirks of the computer haven't fully unraveled yet, so I may update this thread in the future detailing my experiences with it a few weeks or even months from now. For the time being though, enjoy this lengthy thread detailing my adventures with it.
Arrival and assembly
The computer arrived much earlier than expected, and it came in a nice big box that was very neatly put together. Upon opening it up I was greeted with various additional brand stuff like you would expect for a $2K computer but also some stickers and what seems to be a poster. Very cool.Because I wanted to save some money, I decided to get the DIY edition of the laptop. In this state, the computer comes in semi-assembled with the exception of the keyboard, screen bezel, memory, and storage. It instructs you to scan a QR code on the "fabric" that the computer comes in to get assembly instructions. The instructions explain the step-by-step each process of how to assemble the computer like how to install the RAM and SSD, making it easy to follow. If you don't have a screwdriver, you don't have to worry since the computer also comes with one, almost encouraging you to open it up and see what's under the hood. The parts you need to install are put in easy to reach places that are clearly marked. In the process of assembling the computer, it also familiarizes you with its internals and how to remove and install commonly replaced components so in the future you can continue to maintain it, sort of like a car.
Overall, it was very easy to take apart and put back together and it didn't take very long for me to get it booting into the BIOS. It took a little bit to calibrate the memory, but soon I got a message box saying that there was nothing to boot from (as to be expected).
Windows
Out of principle, I refuse to use Windows 11 despite its many graphical improvements due to its aggressive anti-user and invasive nature. So, I instead installed Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC. There was a bunch of hurdles to go through, though few of them were actually the fault of the computer itself. The majority of them were caused by external factors, including my ISP deciding to be absolutely fucking retarded.First, it was the matter of finding and getting the installation media to work - I somehow lost the flash drive and even the DVD that I had to install my operating systems, so I spent an ungodly amount of time searching for the flash drive I had installed Ventoy on and eventually managed to find it. My troubles weren't over however as the flash drive really did not want to cooperate as even though I copied the LTSC 2021 ISO from my main computer to it, the fucking piece of shit would hang whenever I'd try to properly unmount it. When I said fuck it and yanked it from my desktop's USB port and tried to boot into the ISO on the laptop, it failed to boot due to some corrupt BCD bullshit. Oh boy. Luckily for me, I had a copy of LTSC 2019 already on the flash drive and wasn't corrupted to high hell and could actually boot, so I just installed that first. Windows booted and installed perfectly, and even recognized and autometically set the DPI settings for my laptop's screen so that text was actually legible. That was the first hurdle out of the way, but we are far from done.
The second hurdle was upgrading from LTSC 2019 to LTSC 2021. Although LTSC 2019 was workable in its current state, there were no drivers for my trackpad and Wi-Fi card, and I never planned on using that build of Windows on that computer anyways. Since I couldn't find a way to boot into the LTSC 2021 setup directly, I resorted to upgrading the builds by mounting the ISO (a really convenient feature that was introduced in Windows at some point) and running the setup from there. The problem is that all of my USB flash drives were either too small or was fucking retarded and didn't want to cooperate either (usually hanging on some other bullshit like copying the ISO from my computer to it and then being unable to unmount the drive in question), so out of sheer frustration I grabbed a 500 GB external HDD from a decade ago and copied the ISO onto that and plugged it in. It unironically worked better than the more modern flash drives that I had been trying to use, and soon I was running LTSC 2021, which had drivers for my trackpad but still nothing for my Wi-Fi card. With that hurdle over with, I soon encountered another one and this one was agonizing, to say the least.
The final hurdle was the internet, which is something I absolutely needed to really get everything up and running. This hurdle was two-pronged - my computer still didn't have any Wi-Fi drivers that I could use and my ISP decided to be absolutely fucking retarded and took my internet offline for several hours of maintenance. As such, I had to use USB tethering on my phone to get online, but even that was unreliable as download speeds were nowhere near the luxurious speeds I had with my home internet, and that became a problem when I needed to install drivers and updates. I wanted to install drivers directly from the Device Manager but was redirected to Windows Update, which was absolutely unhelpful for getting anything beyond SMBus drivers. Windows seemed to think that I was in immediate danger of being hacked and thus prioritized updates over drivers, and while I might have been in retrospect, that still didn't excuse delaying necessary drivers which very well might have improved performance greatly. I tried using Snappy Driver Installer Origin as I had heard decent things about it, but soon learned that the way it works is that it downloads gargantuan driver packs with the hope being that your drivers are included in that, and with the absolutely abysmal download speeds I had to put up with I estimated that I could grow a full beard and complete a marathon from California to New York and back before it would finish downloading, so back to the drawing board I went. I soon learned that Framework had a dedicated driver pack for their laptops on their website which was only 832 MB in size, and after fighting multiple interruptions in my internet connection, I was finally able to install drivers for pretty much every piece of hardware in the computer.
With updates and drivers installed, it was smooth sailing from there. With proper graphics drivers installed, everything felt butter smooth. I installed some games like Minecraft, Doom 2016, and Skyrim to test its gaming performance compared to my main computer and it ran them smoothly, no problem. I soon started tweaking and customizing the shit out of my Windows installation to make it look more like Windows 7 (complete with the glossy Aero taskbar with StartIsBack++, transparent windows with DWMBlurGlass, and a proper Windows 7 theme called Aero10) and trying to make it look as decent as possible, and that's the stage I'm at now with Windows. Everything runs smoothly and I couldn't be happier.
Linux
I had a lot of trouble with Linux on this computer. I opted to go with Fedora this time around as it has ties to Red Hat (which is pretty much an enterprise-grade Linux), I wanted something that I could guarantee was stable while still having some new bells and whistles, and it is one of two distributions that is officially supported by Framework themselves. Arch Linux does have new bells and whistles, but that comes the cost of stability as it is a rolling release flavor of Linux. While installing it was a breeze (aside from being unable to set my username to "Video", which causes many Linux distributions to chimp the fuck out), I soon noticed multiple issues with how multiple desktop environments behaved with my laptop's 2560x1600 display resolution. To really document my experiences with Linux, I've split this section up by the desktop environments I tried.GNOME
Fedora Workstation comes with the GNOME desktop environment out of the box. While this was definitely the most sturdy, simple, and modern desktop environment out of the box, I didn't plan on using it as my primary desktop environment. Even still, the major flaw with it is that the display scaling was just completely out of whack. Your choices of display scaling are 100%, 200% or 300%. Where's the 150% scale? Is there something wrong with having a compromise solution that is so bad that you need to have UI elements that go from requiring a fucking magnifying class to view them to being able to see them from outer fucking space? The duality of man
After reaching the desktop and picking one of the extreme settings so things were at least be somewhat usable without having a functional dartboard that you can practice from space, I soon installed other desktop environments to see how they look and how they would fare against the accursed high DPI scale problem. I kept GNOME installed because I needed a good reliable fallback desktop environment in case things went tits-up.
KDE Plasma
During discussions I had with Telesphoreo on this topic, he had mentioned that Fedora with Plasma worked well for him with basically zero issues. My past experiences with KDE have been a mixed bag so my general opinion of it has always been conflicted. It's a genuinely beautiful desktop environment that has a lot of customization options. However, it has always had stability issues with me for some reason.Here's a bit of backstory. The first time I tried to experience it was in 2020, where the panels stopped working and soon afterwards the entire desktop environment just stopped working completely. Things were definitely more stable the second time around in 2022/2023 but I always noticed distracting instances of "micro stutter" whenever I was playing games like Minecraft or Doom Eternal which for some reason wasn't reflected in the games' FPS counters. Waking the computer up from sleep mode usually caused at least some form of instability which ranged from the Wallpaper Engine background plugin freezing and crashing to a complete lockup of the desktop environment requiring a forced reboot to get things working again.
With the laptop's hardware and Linux distribution being officially supported by Framework, I decided to give it a try. It automatically recognized my display and set the display scale to 150%, so everything actually scaled as I would have expected. Everything was pretty smooth, though I wasn't a fan of the default look so I attempted to install some themes that looked nice and that's when I encountered my first issue. Whenever I installed new themes (e.g. color schemes, window decorations, global themes, etc), the System Settings application for whatever reason would disappear and then when I would go to try to open it again, nothing would happen. Even running it from the command-line gave me absolutely nothing helpful. I looked the issue up and found a post on Reddit detailing a problem similar to mine and it turns out that for whatever reason, the program was still running in the background but nothing was actually displaying. Killing it and starting it again fixed the problem, but what the fuck? I also encountered numerous miscellaneous stability issues with KDE applications where they would randomly crash for no reason. Eventually, I got it to work but I couldn't figure out how to make my taskbar panel transparent - every time I set the panel to be "translucent" it would have absolutely zero effect whatsoever. I still haven't figured this out.
Why is it such a hassle to get a black taskbar in modern operating systems?
Feeling less confident about the stability of Plasma now that I had run into issues that really should not be issues, I moved on to less eye candy but supposedly more reliable desktop environments.
XFCE
I was very confident that XFCE would work well. I use it on my main desktop computer all the time and it has been very reliable and lightweight compared to other comparable desktop environments while still being customizable. However, this wasn't meant to be.It didn't detect my monitor's DPI scaling so everything defaulted to the 100% scaling level, which was inconvenient to read. In addition, the "Scale" option in the Display settings in XFCE was deceptive and misleading - setting the scale to 2x made UI elements smaller instead of bigger and trying to set the scale to a decimal value only gave me a single decimal point and even then it still looked like shit. It turns out that for it to scale up as I expected while still looking decent, I needed to set the Window Scaling option in the Appearance settings, and even then I was faced with the same bullshit choice of two extremes: smaller than a gnat's dick or suitable for an ant colony. Worse yet, increasing the scale without first enabling the option to set matching XFWM themes in the Styles tab (something which is completely unrelated) doesn't scale up any of the window decorations so the window itself would be astronomical but reaching the title bar and buttons would be like trying to stick your dick into a Cheerio. Furthermore, the mouse cursor also doesn't scale up automatically so you have to separately go into the mouse settings and increase the cursor size manually. In addition, many window manager themes do not support high DPI scaling if at all, so I was facing a small selection of themes that actually looked good with my display out of an already limited selection of themes that actually looked good in general.
This went from 1 to 11 very quickly
This experience was inconvenient and disappointing. Researching the issue seemed to show that Linux desktop environments have a really hard time scaling UI elements up correctly and the solution suggested by some people online, I shit you not, was to reduce the screen resolution. The problem with this solution is that everything looks like fucking shit when you use a lower resolution on monitors like this. XFCE just isn't an option, so I had to ditch it.
NsCDE
Rapidly running out of options and patience, I decided to try NsCDE for shits and giggles to see how it would look and out of desperation that maybe the desktop environment that doesn't have to worry about anti-aliasing or looking beautiful would have the least trouble scaling everything. Oh god how I was wrong. It still didn't automatically scale anything and I couldn't even figure out how to open the display options. The entire thing was clunky and difficult to use. I didn't even bother to reinstall it to take more screenshots because it also has a tendency to fuck with other programs' display options including Konsole.This was the last one I tried before just giving up outright and rebooting into Windows. Linux ran great and I'm sure it would have gamed well, but I found it increasingly frustrating that out of the 4 desktop environments I used, only 1 of them was actually capable of properly adapting to my high resolution screen. That's not great. Sure, maybe you could set some environment variables on startup to instruct the various different libraries to scale as you wish, but this can only get you so far and that's a really inconvenient and hacky thing to have to do just for your desktop to actually look usable on the built-in monitor. Fucking hell.
Overall
I've been very happy with this computer so far. The screen is crisp and vibrant. Adding and moving components is as easy as powering the computer off, pulling on some tabs, and then sliding off the parts. It's also very fast - Minecraft (even with shaders), Doom 2016, and Skyrim ran very smoothly with very little hiccups if any. The keyboard is pleasant to type on, though one quirk I've noticed is that the separate numpad's lights aren't in sync with the keyboard's, but that's not too big of a deal if I'll be honest. The trackpad is about average, as with all laptops you're genuinely better off just using an external USB mouse. Linux is iffy with the built-in display, but Windows has zero problems with it so that's what I've been primarily using. In the future I might skin KDE to try to make it look more like MacOS.Here's hoping my experience will be as good as it is now 6 months from now.
Last edited:
