Hacker News

I just ordered my Framework without any memory or storage, hoping that by the time it arrives, I'll be able to pick up some RAM and an SSD for a more reasonable price. If not, I'll just grab something from a drawer and use it underspecced until prices normalize.

True, but contrary to the fruity models, some of these are upgradedable.

My Asus netbook started with basic configuration and was maximised during its lifetime, just like any PC desktop.

i would highlight two non-tech strengths of starlabs as well: they're based in Europe and from personal experience they have really good customer service

They use the same image on their mini pc's page. https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/byte

Do they actually have a business presence in the EU?

If not, how would those rules apply to them?

Edit: tbh, the new "user friendly" idea of automatically converting US prices to the local currency of the visitor in spite of the company not having any connection to the visitor's locale always makes me think of drop shippers, not of legitimate businesses.

Especially if i'm in a non USD non EUR country, I am fully aware that there are different currencies in the world, I already have an established process for converting between those currencies and it's likely to be more to my advantage than whatever Stripe offers so please cut it down.

They are free to charge you extra for taking the charger out of the box. So I'd grant them a bit of civil disobedience on this one and just take that nice GaN charger.

I can see the EU's take on this, and maybe overall this will even be good. I have some nice Anker chargers and can charge everything we have at home with them (added some USB-C to ligthning/micro-USB thingies here and there), but I'd be a bit annoyed if the EU would force my company operating with small margins to have 2 versions of my packaging workflow.

Maybe they should just "encourage" good behaviour? With a law that is less forcing, ie just say: "If you offer a version without charger, the price must be the same as with charger. " That would (slightly) encourage leaving it out, while not forcing companies' hands.

The laptop is being shipped anyway, so I assume the charger in there may be a "sweet deal" if you need one. 65W GaN chargers are a nice sweet-spot at the moment (size/power/price-wise), ie Ikea has one at 14 eur), wouldn't mine having one or two extra.

Wait til you hear about Hacker News' level of compliance with the GDPR

doesn't charge by USB-C ?

They don't sell you your OS, that's the big surface area that companies like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc have to swallow.

They also don't make these computers and are at the whim of their ODM, so unless you opt for Coreboot/Libreboot, there wouldn't be a possibility for that.

https://doc.coreboot.org/mainboard/starlabs/starfighter_mtl.... The previous version is already upstreamed, apparently.

what's your average battery life?

StarLabs predates Framework by a couple years. Framework just does advertising to geeks better.

On the other hand, full size arrow keys make this a non-starter for me. I need to position my fingers over the arrow keys without looking at them, and half-size allows me to do that by touch feeling.

Most devices still support S3 sleep, it's just disabled by default as s2idle (modern standby) has become the default. You can almost always re-enable S3 sleep if you really want to, but on modern devices it typically only takes a few seconds to resume from S4 (suspend-to-disk) which technically is safer and more reliable. Also you can always use suspend-then-hibernate if you really want fast resume during the day, but long battery life when it's more than an hour or so.

I can't imagine the supply chain challenges inherent to startup laptop manufacturers. I think it's "go with what you have access to at reasonable prices, or forget about it. "

This might be driven by coreboot support?

I have the Intel Core i9 in my 2019 MBP, and it gets so damn hot. How do the ones offered here compare? I'm not one to upgrade frequently, but the heat of this thing makes me go looking. Luckily, it sits on a stand on a desk with more 9s than github is up.

I like it both for the peace of mind that the webcam is off, but also because I anyway have a dedicated external webcam both at the office and at home, so I really don't need a webcam lens in the lid except for the rare occasions where I need to take a meeting on the go.

100% agreed. it upsets me when i see companies like framework advertising themselves front and centre as Linux-first, yet won't sponsor a coreboot port. starlabs, system76 and novacustom actually walk the walk

For sure, once you go OLED you don't go back. It's like going back to a mouse with a ball.

Does it ever worry you that all 8TB could fail in one place? Do you have redundant drives (like two 4TB or four 2TB drives)?

I'd be worried about having all of my storage in one place. I like to back up data to more than one place if it's important, and never have huge on-device storage because if something happens to damage it, I'm assuming it's game over for all on-device storage (rather than only part of it). I'd rather my storage was safe and cozy in some place far from where my laptops go.

But if you're not all that worried and happen to do data-intensive work or something, awesome, 8TB sounds like a dream.

To consumers. You can sell to businesses.

If you want to use it on the beach you will probably need an e-ink display because no laptop screen can compete with the sun. But matte is still infinitely better than glossy for less than ideal conditions such as working on a train where there might be sunlight coming in from the side.

Glossy screens are, in my humble opinion, a stupid gimmick because they look a bit better at ideal viewing conditions. For mobile devices the viewing conditions are most often not ideal, so it really doesn't make any sense unless the screen has to be a touch screen. I have had one laptop with a glossy screen and I ended up putting a glare reducing sticker on it because the glare was intolerable.

Based on my experience with the System 76 Lemur Pro coming from a Macbook Pro, matte helps a bit. You won't have mirror glare like on the Macbook, but the sun will still wash out the matte screen.

What else came out?

The Dell XPS and Framework laptops already far exceed MacBook Pro battery life.

> Looks generic, and has the stereotypical abysmal keyboard and trackpad as any laptop made in the past 10+ years.

I wasn't aware that generic laptops had moved to haptic touchpads and up-firing speakers over ten years ago...

They claim it has a haptic trackpad, so I don't think that's what most manufacturers use.

Yes, the MNT Reform and Pocket Reform both have trackballs[1]. They're very different products from the StarFighter laptop though, in that they sacrifice a lot of potential processing power in exchange for a platform which is much more amenable to customization.

[1]: https://shop.mntre.com/

The MNT Reform has a trackball option.

https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform

Ive always wished for a UHK-style trackball in a laptop: https://uhk.io/product/trackball

you mean like the thinkpad trackpoint?

There isn't exactly a lot of design freedom in a black rectangle with a screen a keyboard and a touchpad. A real Macbook copy would include Macbook misfeatures, like:

- control key in wrong place - camera notch - half sized arrow keys

It doesn't. It looks like a slick laptop, but it is as similar to Macbook Pro as it is to a modern Thinkpad. The hinge in particular stands out and looks like a Thinkpad hinge as opposed to the hidden hinge of a Macbook. Other than that, there is not much design freedom left when the whole industry has kinda agreed that a big trackpad and rounded corners is the way to go.

I think in reality it will look/feel a fair bit different due to the ceramic-coated material.

Asus has similar materials in recent models I believe; I rather like it.

What a boutique criticism

And what design would you rather them emulate?

why?

[flagged]

Looks like they're UK based. I don't know, but apparently tariffs etc are factored into the shipping fees shown on their site.

If you're not sure if you want to go Linux yet, it's probably best to try a live USB stick of a few distros on your existing hardware. Get a feel for what the interface is like, how things work, how it works on your hardware, etc, without actually changing anything. Seems like a better bet to me than buying all-new hardware.

As the other commenter said, evaluate a live usb with any distribution with KDE Plasma Desktop, for example Fedora, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, or Endeavour OS (Arch Linux based). You can also try something like Fedora Kinoite or Bazzite, so called immutable distributions which make it really easy to use for non-technical people.

Have you tried it out?

https://askubuntu.com/questions/629632/can-you-boot-ubuntu-s...

Check out System76 and Framework, they're based in the US and ship Linux machines.

A couple weeks ago, Framework livestreamed a rundown of their 13" laptop lasting over 20 hours on a charge. I can believe the 16" gets there too.

Light usage on low brightness? Nice to know it will last for a long flight.

I have no experience with cachyOS, so can't comment there, but I don't see the point in offering pre-installed Arch. I'd say most Arch users are fairly picky and opinionated about their setup, and would choose to reinstall anyway.

This is satire, right?

Numpad makes notebooks unnecessarily wide (I don't like widescreen, 4:3 was the best aspect ratio), but classical Thinkpad arrows and home key block layout is what I really miss (and Trackpoint with proper drivers and cursor kinematics as it were in linux circa 2005)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/IBM_Thin...

(though I prefer ISO enter, eg. Hungarian, German or Swedish layout)

I never used it. Well, I lie, I did use it back in the day for playing some DOS games where you had to share your keyboard with your friend...

But all my keyboards have been TKL over the past 15+ years and I don't miss it. I don't know why anyone needs to use a numpad unless they're in a job where they work a lot with numbers. And if you're not in such a role, what is your hobby exactly that demands so much number punching?

I bought a bluetooth 10-key. I use the home/end keys religiously when editing in an NLE, and it drove me crazy trying to be a road warrior without it. After having the external, I prefer it as it is full size instead of trying to squeeze it into the laptop frame size. So not having the numpad on the laptop is a-okay for me

I never use my numpad. I use the numbers in the top row of the keyboard.

I'd be super happy to yank my numpad out of my laptop, move the keyboard a little bit to the right and center align it with the center of the screen. My head would be centered with the middle of the screen too.

Unfortunately I had to settle with that keyboard because every other laptop was a worse tradeoff.

I only use a number pad for playing a few games, and for bulk data entry. Neither of those use cases are something I prefer using my laptop for, and even on my desktops they're rare enough that I'd much rather have the number pad separate and largely out of the way.

What do you use a number pad for often enough to not only see it as mandatory for you, but to leave you unable to imagine how anyone could live without it?

Easy - by moving numpad to your main keyboard with a modifier so you don't need to move your hand just to type numbers

I do not understand why a numpad is considered a necessity by some. I never used it when I had them. Do you work in data entry?

I do number entry with the number row. 8 fingers > 3 fingers.

Absolutely hate numberpads on laptops - if you're sitting with the laptop directly in front of you it means your arms and hands are slightly offset to the left for normal typing.

For serious work, I'm docked and using a large monitor, split keyboard, etc. Many people make concessions when on a laptop.

What do you use yours for? All I’ve ever missed it for was the default Blender keybinds for the camera perspective