- overall very happy with it for my uses. I don’t do a lot of intense workloads on the laptop, mostly stuff like text editing and latex compiling.
- battery is great. With screen brightness reasonably low and working on low intensity tasks, I could get 8 hours I think pretty easily. Probably 3 hours of video calls.
- durability is good so far. My librem 13 lasted about 4 years before succumbing to a hinge issue which I believe has been addressed for the 14s
- ergonomics are good for me, trackpad keyboard etc. are great especially once you get used to them.
- expect some challenges if you’re going to run a different distro. Be prepared to put in some effort. Things are probably better now it’s been out longer.
- due to foss requirements the wifi range isn’t the greatest. You can easily and cheaply switch out the card if you want.
- One issue I had was plugging in a certain external dock to the usb c port and the entire computer shuts off immediately.
- not sure how it fares for intense compute tasks. I rarely get any fan noise but sometimes it will kick in noticeably.
I also echo others that, depending on the battery life situation, take another look at framework. I haven’t put a ton of hours on it yet but a very pleasant machine.
Also using a Librem 14 as my daily driver but less happy with it.
The machine seems to lose track of its charge level pretty easily, so it tends to power off suddenly, especially if it’s been in sleep mode for a while.
The hinge feels a bit flimsy; I’m hoping it’ll hold up long-term but there’s some give to it that makes me a bit nervous about its longevity.
The keyboard has been disappointing; my experience with it has been that it doesn’t register key presses until just after the tactile bump. Suffice to say this has led to a lot of missing keystrokes and frustration.
Also, something (I think some wires) seems to catch on one of the fans on the underside, leading to a rather annoying noise (and I suspect reduced fan performance) when any pressure is placed on the bottom panel. I’ve cracked it open to see if I can shift things around a bit, but the cable routing is tight enough that I’m not confident I can without damaging something.
I really wanted to like the Librem 14, because it’s goals really resonate with me, but… it isn’t as polished as I’d hoped it would be.
> expect some challenges if you’re going to run a different distro.
There are some battery life/suspend issues that seem to be rooted in the disabled intel ME. I'll have to track it down, but I recall purism trying to get a kernel patch upstream from their PureOS. It surfaced on Arch, but I haven't seen it on Qubes, which is their other first-class OS.
> trackpad keyboard etc. are great especially once you get used to them.
N.B., they only offer US qwerty. The keys have quite a bit of travel, which is fine for me. The thing that really still gives me some grief is the mini shift key. If you're a right-pinky shifter, you're going to need to stretch. If you miss, you've hit up-arrow and now you're typing on the wrong line.
The speakers are perhaps the worst I've ever heard. Doesn't bother me because I never use them, but on that note, bluetooth is a little tricky out of the box since pureos doesn't ship a driver. Not sure if another distro just works.
Also, as mentioned elsewhere, it's really simple to take apart, upgrade, fix, etc. No torx, glue, or esoteric fasteners. I dumped 64gb ram in it for like $200 and it took about 3 minutes.
Don't recall hitting the battery life issues, at least in a long time. I do remember having to install some packages about battery management but it wasn't tricky. This is the one thing Framework really trails on for me.
Is my daily driver currently running Linux mint.
- overall very happy with it for my uses. I don’t do a lot of intense workloads on the laptop, mostly stuff like text editing and latex compiling.
- battery is great. With screen brightness reasonably low and working on low intensity tasks, I could get 8 hours I think pretty easily. Probably 3 hours of video calls.
- durability is good so far. My librem 13 lasted about 4 years before succumbing to a hinge issue which I believe has been addressed for the 14s
- ergonomics are good for me, trackpad keyboard etc. are great especially once you get used to them.
- expect some challenges if you’re going to run a different distro. Be prepared to put in some effort. Things are probably better now it’s been out longer.
- due to foss requirements the wifi range isn’t the greatest. You can easily and cheaply switch out the card if you want.
- One issue I had was plugging in a certain external dock to the usb c port and the entire computer shuts off immediately.
- not sure how it fares for intense compute tasks. I rarely get any fan noise but sometimes it will kick in noticeably.
I also echo others that, depending on the battery life situation, take another look at framework. I haven’t put a ton of hours on it yet but a very pleasant machine.