Framework Laptop 12 Meets Fedora | Fedora Podcast 061

Framework does not have a storefront you can walk into. No shelves, no display models, nobody hovering to ask if you need help. What they do have is a laptop you can order that arrives with Fedora already on it, and a screwdriver in the box.

Michael Tunnell is the Senior Marketing Manager for Linux Marketing at Framework, and before that he spent years covering this ecosystem at TuxDigital. Noah is back this week too, after missing the last episode because he was stuck forty feet in the air on a scissor lift with a dead battery. He assures me that putting cable back up the right way is worse than doing a podcast.

A few things worth carrying away from this one:

• The 80 percent number is more interesting than it first looks. Framework says roughly 80 percent of Laptop 12 owners run Linux. What makes that number mean something is when it was measured: there was no Fedora preload on the previous Laptop 12, so every one of those people installed Linux themselves after buying the machine. That is not a preference revealed by a checkout page. That is people buying hardware and immediately replacing what came on it.
• Fedora KDE got picked for a boring technical reason, which is the best kind. Michael was careful about this. KDE won because in testing it had the best stylus and touchscreen support, not because he is a KDE person, which he freely admits he is. Fedora won because the hardware needs a very recent kernel and Fedora moves fast on kernel and Mesa. He went out of his way to say he did not pull any strings.
• “Officially supported” has a specific meaning here. It is three things stacked: engineering collaboration with the distro, support for the distro itself, and a human at Framework you can actually contact. Buy a Laptop 12 and you can reach a dedicated Linux support specialist. That last part is the one most vendors skip.
• The fixes go upstream, and he had receipts. A CPU limiter and thermals bug on the new Wildcat Lake silicon, audio support for several modules, and screen rotation. All found, reported, worked through with Fedora developers, and landed in the kernel. Michael was personally in that loop this time.
• The openness goes past the OS. The backlit keyboard runs ZMK, which is open source firmware. They publish CAD files so you can 3D print your own components. Michael’s framing: “we want people to see their Framework laptop as their laptop, not our laptop.”
• My favorite exchange of the episode. Noah asked what it actually costs a company internally to commit to repairability instead of planned obsolescence. Michael: “I can’t really go into the details of how much it costs us on the logistics part of it, because I don’t know. I’m the marketing guy, so it’s a little bit out of my scope.” Noah: “Good answer.”

We also got into the expansion card system, where two of the four slots on the 12 are Thunderbolt 4, the fingerprint reader living in the power button, a shared grievance about the laptop that replaced its right control key with a fingerprint sensor, and the wireless keyboard Framework has coming with open firmware of its own.

Worth noting where this sits in the arc. We had Matt Hartley on back in episode 44 to talk about Framework and Fedora as a partnership. That was about what it would take. This episode is the machine shipping with Fedora in it.

The Laptop 12 is available to preorder now, with batches starting to ship around the beginning of October. The prebuilt comes in Sage with Fedora KDE loaded. The DIY edition saves you some money and, by Michael’s account, is much less scary to assemble than you think.

One bit of personal news I mentioned on air: I started a new job this week as a Solutions Architect at GitLab. Back in Tanooki land, and glad to be there.

Next episode we finally get to Project Hummingbird with Scott McCarty and Jorge Castro.