Remix clone Hacker News

Yes. Unequivocally.

Had my 13 for a couple of years now, Debian/XFCE.

I've owned and only owned a 13 laptop for about ten years now.

I can't imagine buying a laptop from a major vendor (Samsung, Sony, Asus, etc). There are some smaller vendors, but they don't sell what I want in terms of a spec, and what FW offers, both in terms of kit (the spec I want) and repairability / honesty / lack of stuff being pushed on you / etc, I can't think of anyone else I could buy from.

Note that being able to self-repair is a very good thing. One of the keys died, early last year. I ordered a new keyboard, it arrived, I spent an afternoon swapping them over. Took a couple of hours. Compare that to posting the laptop off for a warranty repair - and that's if the vendor gets the repair right. I remember once having Sony make a repair, and the messed it up, broke the Windows install (which I had at the time), and it only went down-hill from there.

(In the end Sony support wanted to bill me 250 EUR to fit a new spinning-disk HD, to replace the 700 EUR Intel X-25 SSD I had bought and fitted, so they could have in place on the laptop a vanilla install of Windows, to "fix" how they had broken my fully-installed and configured for development Windows, where they had in fact swapped out the motherboard (underneath an installed Windows!) to replace a fan.)

Being able to buy parts and install yourself, if you can do it, is a billion light years better than relying on large company customer support.

One or two other notes;

1. Being able to swap the ports around, and change what's in each port, is something once you've had it, you can't go back.

2. The lappy runs hot out of the box; you have to configure thermal management yourself, in Linux. Mine runs at about 70C tops now (instead of going to 100C and staying there).

3. Sleep mode doesn't work properly, in that there's plenty of power drain. I've not updated the BIOS since I purchased - I have a vague thought this might have been fixed.

4. Battery life out of the box is not comparable to big-brand laptops, but I sat down, sorted out power management, and on Linux, I get more than 10 hours out of a battery at 80% (the max charge I have configured on mine, to extend battery life).

▲

snapplebobapple 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Whats the logic behind extending battery life when you paid a premium for a laptop with an easily replaceable and reasonably priced battery? Surely the extra time of uae over years is worth more than the replacement cost?

	▲	casenmgreen 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well, I very rarely take the laptop away from my desk. If I knew I was going on a long trip, I would put the charge up to 100%. When I do go on a long trip, then there's benefit in conserving battery life, because the charge I'll take with me will be substantially higher.

▲

seanhunter 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A couple of notes on the FW13 vs FW16 difference. 1. agree

2. My fw16 actually makes my legs feel cold when I put it on my lap so I'm gonna say they fixed this

3. Haven't had it long enough to know much about the drain but wanted to add that suspend and hibernate both actually work for me which is a bit of a novelty and I've had a variety of linux laptops over the last 20 years[1].

4. This may be a FW13 vs 16 thing or maybe just because mine is new but it unscientifically seems ok so far. Probably not quite as good as my M4 mac laptop I'm migrating from but on the other hand everything actually works on this vs a bunch of things not being able to use the GPU acceleration on the mac (eg pytorch) so I'll take this one.

Just to double down on the support thing. It's really great to work with a company that acknowledges linux and supports it as a first-class offering[2]. I've worked with companies (eg Dell) who at one point would sell you a laptop preinstalled with Linux and then if you had any problems with the hardware itself treat it as though Linux was the problem and you were some kind of highly suspect individual for not running Windows.

[1] In fact this is the first linux laptop I've ever had where suspend/resume and hibernate/resume and suspend-the-hibernate all pretty much just work and there aren't some weird things where hibernation doesn't work at all or after resuming from hibernation the wifi/sound/some random other thing doesn't work. I had a linux laptop once where the keyboard would accept my luks password on resume from hibernate and then bafflingly disable itself as part of the resume process which I don't even know where to start.

[2] eg https://community.frame.work/t/status-of-official-linux-dist... they actually have a real linux support lead and will give you actual support on linux although you'll have to lean on the community more if you're not using a supported distro

▲

mks_shuffle 2 days ago | parent [-]

Can you please elaborate a bit more about your issues with PyTorch on M4 mac. I read PyTorch has some support for Mac GPU with MPS backend, but not sure how extensive it is. I am looking for a new machine, and use of PyTorch and LLM inference are one of the main uses. Sorry for being a bit off-topic from the thread. Thanks.

	▲	seanhunter 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I couldn't get pytorch to use the mac GPU at all. I didn't spend ages on it - like about a day. In general I find the build environment on mac really annoying compared to say Linux so it may be that with more patience it could be done. IT was also on my work computer and setting up Xcode command line tools on my work mac is super annoying for whatever dumb reason, but basically getting any kind of prebuilt python version (like say the ones that ship with rye) to talk to your Xcode if it's not in the same path as the one that built the python version is annoying, so then you're looking at building the whole of python which is not that hard but (when I tried it) meant it broke the next time Xcode upgraded. I tried symlinks to the sdk etc but that was no bueno for reasons I don't quite remember. And then even having done that and patched pytorch it didn't actually run GPU accelerated. So bottom line is it might be possible to make it work but in my brief attempt I couldn't get it to work. If you're at all linux-capable I would say it's hands down a better dev experience in every way (and that's coming from someone who's used macs for years and years in both a professional and private capacity).