I've got a Framework 16 and love it.

Framework are nowhere near the scale of any of the large manufacturers, and they've had to spend a huge amount of time and money on R&D, so their laptops are probably always going to cost more. IMO it's worth the price though, given you can keep updating it over time.

I've been getting annoying amdgpu crashes every now an then. I've tried all the various BIOS and kernel params but so far nothing has worked. Next step is rolling back a kernel version, at least that's what I've gathered from all the threads about it. It's bothersome but not frequent enough to be a real pain.

(This is an amd framework 13 with fedora 42 / wayland)

Another vote here for framework 13. Love mine.

I've had mine about 4 months, minimal issues. I got a 7840U slightly on sale when the new AI 300 series came out.

I'm also running fedora 42, but it's Bluefin, based on silverblue. Everything works out of the box.

My biggest complaint is the sleep battery drain, iirc it's something like a few percent per hour, so I just get in the habit of turning it completely off if I'm not home with it plugged in. Otherwise it's dead when I need it, which sucks.

Also the fan can be a little loud and overzealous under barely moderate load, though I've found keeping it in power saving mode helps keep things cooler. Though I've been using it for note taking during some schooling this week, and it's been stone cold and silent, lasts all day on a single charge. So it definitely depends on your load. I appreciate having the power available when I need it, but wish it was better at keeping itself underclocked (or whatever it needs to do).

And finally the stock Wi-Fi 6 card in it gives some people problems with certain routers. Though I've only ever had problems with my parents starlink router 🤷‍♂️
That's a quick $20 upgrade though, to Wi-Fi 7, I just haven't needed to 🤷‍♂️

But still I'd buy another in a heartbeat.

Keyboard is great. Screen (2.8k) looks great to my eyes, though others say it has issues. No flex in the body. Touchpad is a little funky, but still great.

Plus when I want to upgrade the platform in a few years, or any component breaks before then, I can just fix it or upgrade it.

Highly recommend.

thanks for the reply!

How do you plan to restore if the whole drive dies?

good point: I guess if the problem is that I messed something up I may just run the backup script in reverse? if the problem is HW then I'd have to reinstall and then restore the backupped directory probably
is there a "standard" way?

wouldn't this take a lot of time? but I can see the advantage, being able to just roll back whatever happened

I'll think about it, thank you very much!

they laugh.

All the old people are fucked and have to fumble with (from their pov) alien technology (a smartphone).

At least thats what I've heard from the family of friends that live in Germany.

Arch is definitely not "an experimental distro". It doesn't just break, and all the software in their repos is considered stable.

If you have been using Arch for any meaningful amount of time, the massive output from OPs upgrade should be glaring.

You just gave me words for something that was previously just vague internal grumbling and emotions.

Manjaro knows how to aesthetically please me with their color choices and background art. I've got a negative impression from various podcasts and forum posts but I'm realizing I need to look into that more because I can't recall specifics besides something about a past issue with package distribution.

Manjaro is significantly worse with updates breaking.

I used for a little while in 2018 and again in 2019, both times ended because it once became stuck in a boot loop after updates, and another time couldn’t boot after updates.

the initial state should match the final as closely as possible, in this case by installing the new optional dependencies automatically

Sometimes. Some of us out there have use cases where we really, really don't want our systems making choices for us and would rather read the notes every time. One could equally well argue that an OS whose entire purpose is letting the user make the choice suddenly doing something automatically without asking for input is the break in state that users would find astonishing.

I'd say you want Linux from Scratch then, but even then the Linux kernel maintainers are making choices for you.

But Linus is very firm in that they never break userspace, so you should never see an issue like this when updating the kernel.

I second Debian Testing. The only issues I have are updates slow down during package freezes and sometimes, a package you are using becomes a victim of a package transition. Both are symptoms of Testing being exactly what it says, so I can't blame them, but still a valid annoyance.

The worst example was FreeCAD had a dependency being transitioned, so FreeCAD disappeared from Testing for a while, meaning my system wouldn't update if I wanted to keep FreeCAD. In the end, I just gave up and used the Flatpak. (I probably could have installed from Unstable, but whatever.)

Truth be told, I kind of wish there was a project to keep some new packages flowing to Testing users during freezes. I get why Debian themselves doesn't do it - it would be a nightmare to maintain - but an outside community project would be amazing. It wouldn't exactly be easy, but such a project wouldn't need to necessarily do every package (just desired ones), and they would only need to maintain them a couple months until new versions start flowing into Testing again. I think the biggest difficulty is not going too far ahead of what will end up in Testing post-freeze.

debian testing is for testing purposes only. you should never daily drive debian testing (unless you know what you're doing)

also, we're about to get a new debian release (trixie), this is literally the worst time you could choose to daily drive debian testing