Been a Dell laptop user for over a decade... always Latitudes (corp-grade). I love my Framework 13 AMD 7840U. The performance for compute is within a hairs breadth of my overclocked desktop i7-12700K gaming rig and the GPU is more than capable enough for some light gaming.

There are caveats. The keyboard is not quite as good as those Dell laptops I came from and because it's so modular it is a little chonkier than some of the super slim offerings coming from Dell, Lenovo and the like. However, the keyboard is still excellent for all day use and I use it every day. Battery life is good but unremarkable... about 6-7 hours easily and 8 if I REALLY baby it but I'm never that far from a power outlet and it charges quickly.

I run Ubuntu 22.04 and it's really good so long as you follow the installation guides... 24.04 should fix that when it lands in a few weeks as it contains a lot of updated stuff particularly GPU drivers that should smooth things out even more. Still, it's been my primary daily driver for ~7 months now and I have zero complaints.

I do love having the expansion cards... such a cool feature. I don't change them THAT often but it is really nice to have a real Ethernet card in my backpack, as well as a DisplayPort and HDMI depending on my needs (former for monitors, latter for hotel room TV's typically)... and on a "daily driving" configuration I typically have two USB-C ports, one USB-A and DisplayPort. The other cards hang out in my bag (another USB-A port, another USB-C port and the aforementioned HDMI and Ethernet cards). To your question you asked darkain, they're really very robust; the physical ports are actually USB-C/Thunderbolt so they're designed for frequent plugging and unplugging, but instead of relying on the mechanical pressure "latching" of the USB-C ports themselves they have their own slide and lock mechanisms that are well built and nice and tight.

The problem isn't just integrating the code from the vendors; it's regression testing against your own codebase for the rest of the firmware and against all other potential configurations. That makes it a much harder hill to climb than you think and there absolutely have been times that microcode coming from a CPU or other chip vendor has been buggy or has behaviours that are unexpected or undesirable.

Would you want a firmware release that'd brick your SSD because of some interaction problem?

Sure the "obvious" solution is to have more testers... but Framework are a small company and can only test so much.

Louis Rossman has a ton of videos on Macs and their quality problems. Yeah, he does have a bit of an axe to grind but his company still fixes Macs quite happily... and he shows why they're not great computers in great detail.

You did something wrong. I followed these instructions;

https://askubuntu.com/question...

I've been running non-snap Firefox now since I installed 22.04 back in... umm... September I think? Can't recall exactly offhand.

Until battery technology improves radically, that's not going to happen. The energy density of batteries is pretty bad compared to gasoline and you still need a LARGE and HEAVY battery pack to get the sort of range and functionality people want.

Now, you COULD make a small and light roadster with a very short range... say less than 100 miles... but nobody will buy it because of the range. It's a catch-22. With current tech it would have to be an incredibly niche product, and niche products aren't cheap.

I think the closest I see on the horizon right now is the Polestar 6, but that's not going to be anywhere close to cheap... try 911 turbo territory.

I grew up in Northern Ireland. I never saw air conditioning at all until I moved to London and even that was in office buildings and shops, not residences. I think even in London the highest temperature I ever actually remember seeing was ~90F or so... maybe 92F and even that was brutal to me at the time.

I moved to the Midwest US in the late 1990's and it blew my mind that air conditioning in the home was a thing. Had never even considered the idea. However my first Oklahoma City summer soon informed me why; it was dry but oh my God it was hot! Moving to St. Louis later just made that even worse with basically very similar temperatures but 90-100% humidity added into the mix throughout the summer. I learned my limits quickly of being outside in that!

This... completely. I actually did some consulting work for them a few years back (around 5 years ago) and even then we called out backup and DR as a risk. They knew it was a risk but all they could do was take recommendations to the board.

Sad... and unfortunately in the end inevitable.

I mean... buy the book from Amazon and have a screen reader read the text to you? I know the processing power in a phone may not be enough just now to make it convincing but surely isn't this already solved? Seems like adding an AI-driven text-to-speech to the Kindle app or whatever would solve this problem.

As for Audiobooks; leave them alone. Continue making Audiobooks the traditional way and we as consumers just purchase them separately. I already do; I own both versions of a number of books because a good narrator can bring something to the table that isn't in the original books. It wouldn't be the first time I've purchased a book not because it was from a writer I loved, but because it was narrated by someone whose previous narrations I have loved... and through that I have discovered new authors I then follow. Most narrators tend to be "themed" as in they usually get brought in to narrate a book that's somewhat related if not in genre then in themes to other books they've previously narrated. Science fiction narrators tend to stay in science fiction, fantasy in fantasy and so on... though they do crossover frequently and sometimes narrate books that are quite different but tangentially related... and sometimes I find a new interest that way.

Discoverability of new works is already difficult enough these days. Moving audiobooks to AI narration instead of human beings just removes yet another avenue to discoverability. Sure, it's cheaper... but at what cost?

I should add I do keep a Windows laptop around that's now running Windows 11. That's mostly for work when I'm traveling. While I definitely don't mind supporting a Linux desktop "on the move" there are certainly Windows-specific apps I need when I'm in the field. As a result, I have that Windows machine and it's fine. My next laptop might be more powerful to allow me to run some Windows VM's for use in-the-field and run Linux (probably Ubuntu) on the hardware, but I'm in no rush to refresh this one (circa 2019 Latitude 7400 2-in-1)

I can tell you that I do a lot of audio work myself and have done for years. I had dabbled with the Linux desktop many times but this most recent time I put Ubuntu 18.04 on my primary machine back in 2018 and have actually been incredibly happy with it. As you noted, with Jackd2 and PipeWire for high-quality audio work Linux is definitely right there and in some ways better than Windows. My desktop now runs Ubuntu 20.04 with the -lowlatency kernel and for both my audio work and the little bit of video editing I also dabble in it's been amazing, solid, stable and predictable.

And I don't know if I'm just not a demanding gamer, but just about every game I've thrown at this setup has worked great as well... now granted I don't do a lot of multiplayer and every game I have these days is on Steam... but even big AAA releases seem to just work most of the time. In fact, most of the problems I have with games tend to be the small indie developers or the single developers. The only recent examples I can think of that required either fiddling or just plain didn't work for me were Exo One and Starship EVO... again, small studios. But even then a few updates later both worked straight out of the box and I have no issues with either now. Yes, most of my games run under Proton rather than native... but I don't typically see any problems with these running.

I will admit I run the proprietary NVidia drivers... but Windows users do too. So if you're a complete nut for "untainted open source" then yeah you're going to have a hard time... but having said that if you're going for fully open source why are you trying to get inherently closed-source games to work anyway? I do very occasionally hit performance issues with games, but they are vanishingly rare at this point and seem no worse than performance issues reported on similar hardware in Windows. I might not be getting the absolute maximum framerate out of every game, but over 60fps I am not sure I've ever actually cared all that much except for "bragging rights". The games look and move fine by my standards and I can play them. Maybe with my age my eyes just don't care all that much any more :) Simply put; my video card can drive my 120hz widescreen monitor just fine for everything I throw at it; why should I care about a few more FPS?

As for sound drivers, that actually tends to be a pretty solid support experience in Linux. Sound just isn't being developed or advanced the way graphics are; there's just no need. There's little that needs to be done with audio that really will make a significant difference to the finished product because human ears haven't changed and computers frankly were well able to do audio work decades ago. Sure, more CPU horsepower means I have more channels to play with and better DSP's can help make my final mix cleaner, but the truth is that the technology didn't plateau but certainly reached the "flattening of the curve" part of it development a long time ago and most new hardware is merely incremental improvements and usually actually using the same hardware with a few new interfaces attached. I literally can't remember the last time I plugged in a new bit of sound hardware and it didn't just work out of the box, even if it said it was for Windows and I couldn't find any specifics about whether or not it was supposed to work. In fact the only problem I have with Linux and audio is that I have so many inputs and outputs in my machine that every now and again it gets confused about my defaults and I find myself jumping on a conference call where noone can hear me or I can't hear them and I discover that it's trying to use some other audio device that's not immediately preferred for the meeting. Fixing that takes me 10 seconds in the Ubuntu mixer.

I can do math. 300 million confirmed infected so far, 5.5 million dead. That's more like a 1.8% death rate. I'll grant you that the number actually infected is a lot higher than 300 million, but in order for your 99.96% survival rate to be even close to valid even right now, there would have had to have been 14 billion confirmed infections, or almost twice the human population of the planet.

This is still a developing situation so it's fluid so frankly neither of our numbers will be valid when it's all said and done. But the death toll has already been horrific by human standards. We are already at 3 times the number of people dead than died in the Vietnam war and have even exceeded the death toll of the Korean war. Even with a softening of the curve we are already looking very seriously at World War 1 levels of death, and if we're really unlucky World War 2.

He's vindictive against the Post Dispatch because it's a centrist newspaper that skews left, that's been pretty critical of his administration since the start. And rightfully so. He doesn't like the PD because they don't particularly like him and tend to call him on his bullshit.

That's all this is about. I'm not sure he even cares if he gets the prosecutor to bring charges, or whether they get a conviction. He only cares that he's had a couple of months of being able to badmouth the Post Dispatch to his base who lap that shit up because they are primed to pretty much believe anything he says.

Source: Live in St. Louis.

As an ex Dell employee (got hit by a "Workforce Reduction" last year) I will say that Dell has always been a proponent of WFH for the majority of its staff. Since a large portion of Dell's employee base is in sales, technical or other similar roles they can absolutely WFH more effectively than at an office. Hell, in St. Louis we only had an office for a short time because EMC had one that they had just renewed the lease on. Guess which office closed last year and isn't coming back?

Yes, there are plenty of roles still at Dell that are better with people on-site. A lot of engineering is pretty hands-on, but from my friends still at Dell I hear a lot of the admin staff (HR, Accounting etc.) are virtually all WFH with an "As needed" office option which few people ever exercise.

I do miss working there... it was a fun place to work. But I've done better in the last year anyway doing my own thing on contract :)

... I should add that I did have more than two stops, but the additional ones were relatively short 10-15 minute stops where I just topped up enough to get to the next stop. Perfect to use the facilities, grab myself a cup of coffee etc.

How long would you stop to eat during that trip? You can plan your charging stops around when you stop to eat. I did a 600 mile drive 10 days ago in an EV (non-Tesla and not the most efficient on the market either) and the charging was a non issue. I stopped, plugged in and walked to a nearby restaurant in the two stops I had for long stops, and it was ready to go when I was. Actually, before I was.

It's also worth noting that unlike an ICE car, with an EV you don't charge to 100% every time; you plan your charging stops such that you charge enough to reach the next charging stop with a 10-15% buffer remaining. Range anxiety isn't a thing if you plan better, and virtually every EV I've driven has great trip planning built in to get to the next charging stop easily, and many of them integrate nicely with cloud services to they can even tell you how many stalls are available.

Now, I'm not going to claim an EV is perfect for every use case but the reasons not to use an EV for trips are diminishing rapidly. There's certainly a certain stratification of EV's right now in that you have the expensive, near-luxury or luxury cars that can easily do road trips, and the lower cost "city-focused EV's" that aren't quite as good (lower range, slower charging speeds). There are cars coming soon that will fill out that "middle ground" quite nicely like the Kia EV6, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Genesis GV60 that are going to be more cost effective but still have good range and good charging speeds.