May not be great, but it's not dead. :-D

Quite. That's why I asked if it turned on, not if it booted.

[Article author here]

That is what I asked at the end!

Loongson chips are MIPS.

Loongson is shifting millions of units and making half a billion a year.

https://www.wsj.com/market-dat...

That is not bad for a "dead" architecture.

True, but not the point.

The point isn't that you can swap the Framework's motherboard fast. The point is, you can swap it at all.

You can buy a faster mobo, and you can reuse the old mobo. You can swap your keyboard. (Only for an an assortment of other crappy keyboards but people are working on it.) You can switch your USB-C port out for Ethernet or HDMI. You can have 2 HDMI ports if you want.

The point is, these things are maintainable, by the owners, without special gear.

My decade-old Thinkpads are too but there's more choice with Frameworks and if you want thin and light and fast, they are great.

I do not want thin, or light, or fast. I want:

1. A good keyboard.
2. 3 mouse buttons.
3. Loads of ports
4. A removable battery

Then I'd like a long battery life.

Then I care about fast.

Hi. Article author here. I am writing on an old Thinkpad, a W520. I have a bunch of them. My favourite is the X220. I've got 2 of them and I have lost count of how many times I've stripped them down, replaced RAM or SSD or keyboard or something, and rebuilt them again.

There is NO WAY I could do it in 5 min, no matter how long I practised.

The audience member was the author of the article: me.

[Author here]

Why GPL in particular?

[Article author here]

> a much easier path

But it's not always about what is _easy_. It's about what is the long-term better course for your company.

Cool to see it on the front page of /. Thanks!

[Article author here]

> there's an attempt here to put Azure in the headlines,

Nah. Read the whole article.

They've tried this at least once before, at the end of last year, and very publicly failed.

This is not about "hey look at us" because they did that before and it was not good. It is more like "hey, we made it work, listen, here's how".

Article author here.

> There is no reason to go use a Linux distribution from a company that would have to make vacuum cleaners in order to make something that doesn't suck.

Sure there is. There are several.

* You are already a customer of that company;

* You want to minimise your number of suppliers;

* You have already paid (for support or for hosting or whatever) and you don't want to pay more;

* You have already got investment in that company and want to keep it

* Guaranteed compatibility and/or interop

Those are just the first few off the top of my head.

Don't underestimate this stuff. It's kept hundreds or thousands of entire multi-billion-dollarcorporations alive for decades... maybe centuries.

Well, if that doesn't help my karma, what will? ;-)

BTW I didn't just submit it, I wrote the article as well.