Acquisition
I got a new laptop, a Framework Laptop 13 with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU. I ordered it on April 6th 2025 with a delivery date of "Q2 2025" and it arrive on May 23rd. I think if I'd pulled the trigger earlier I'd have gotten into an earlier batch and quicker delivery.
It arrived as we were leaving for a weekend away, so I grabbed my extra SSD and a couple of USB flash drives and hit the road. Putting it together was a complete breeze and pleasure. There are magnets - magnets are fun.
Out With The Old
This replaces a ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7 that I bought back in 2022. For many years I've pretty much exclusively used ThinkPad X series laptops. Recently X1s, usually regular Carbons, but Yogas a couple of times. I like touch screens and I like the idea of using a stylus, but in practice I don't use the stylus much at all.
The ThinkPad's performance was fine. It's got a recent-enough CPU and enough RAM to do anything I expect a laptop to do. The problem was that the USB-C ports that are also used for charging were wearing out. The right cable at the right angle was fine, but I was finding myself curating charging cables, preferring one port over another. I didn't want to end up with a laptop I could no longer charge, so I decided to buy a new one - and one with swappable ports was obviously stood out.
Good Stuff
So what's good about the Framework? It's fast, it's light, it's solid. The keyboard is good, the screen is good. Everything works out of the box on Linux (I installed Debian Testing, FWIW). I sort of take all of this for granted having used ThinkPad X1s for a long time, but I know this is a hard bar to reach.
Tweaks
Fingerprints
I installed fprintd with `sudo apt install fprintd libpam-fprintd`, enabled it with `sudo pam-auth-update --enable fprintd` and then enrolled my right index finger using the standard GNOME settings UI. More details on the Debian wiki.
What I Miss
Keyboard
I'm not one of those insufferable keyboard people. Older ThinkPad keyboards were better, but the recent generations have been fine. The Framework 13 keyboard feels fine too.
So far I miss keyboard backlight for when I'm sitting in the dark, and page-up/down keys which are key parts of hotkeys I use to switch tabs and scroll terminals all day long. I'll deal.
Annoyances
Keyboard Layout
The biggest annoyance so far is that the Ctrl and Fn keys are swapped between ThinkPad and Framework keyboards. I have muscle memory to overcome, but since I use a ThinkPad for work, I can't just retrain myself. If Framework offered a variation on the keyboard that swapped them I would.
The Framework 16 keyboard runs the QMK firmware which allows tweaking, but the Framework 13 apparently does not. Maybe I can dig in the BIOS, or just deal.