[paulmd]

Honestly it is a trust issue. I almost bought a framework laptop last year. People pitched it as a seriously viable alternative to the MacBook and applied social pressure to give it serious consideration. I realize now that it would have been a serious waste of a large amount of money and time and yes, that is a trust issue.

And you can say “well that wasn’t the official framework org” but they’re kinda holding themselves out as a serious contender (marketing on LTT etc) yet apparently don’t have things as basic as working Linux drivers (in their officially supported choice of distro)! I think there is indeed a general belief among the public that you need to at least get that far before holding yourself out for public consumption, as a non-beta product, yeah. When you do those sorts of things it’s clearly not being held out as an enthusiast device for tinkering etc, and then people will have some (reasonable) expectations that it’s gonna actually work. If not, arguably it’s FTC time at that point.

It’s kinda the same as AMD graphics drivers on windows… having the fans repeatedly insist they’ve never had a driver issue for 10 years now (when Vega, rdna1, and rdna3 all had major issues that lasted a significant amount of time) does destroy trust among the public when they try it and see it’s not true. Nothing feels worse than recommending them to a friend based on seeming internet consensus and having them have problems over the advice I gave them. Spent a lot of time trying to debug remotely and get their 5700xt working etc, never did, they ended up selling and buying a 2060S that worked perfectly, and I’ve never trusted the fans again.

The boy who cried wolf is a cultural touchstone for a reason, we don’t like being called to action for something that turns out to be untrue. And spending a lot of money to learn that lesson generally does create a trust issue that turns people off with these brands.

[kelnos]

> People pitched it as a seriously viable alternative to the MacBook and applied social pressure to give it serious consideration. I realize now that it would have been a serious waste

So let me get this straight: a bunch of your friends evangelized Framework to you, but you decided not to go with it, and later realized you made the right decision. And because of that, you don't "trust" Framework (the company). That's not only a weird overreaction, but also a weird place to assign blame. Maybe tell your friends to stop pressuring you to buy things that aren't your cup of tea? Or, hell, maybe tell your friends to stop pressuring you to buy things, period... cuz that's kinda an inappropriate thing for a supposed friend to do?

> apparently don’t have things as basic as working Linux drivers

Not sure what you mean; Linux runs fine on my Framework, with all hardware fully supported.

> I think there is indeed a general belief among the public that you need to at least get that far before holding yourself out for public consumption

I think the general belief among the public is, "Linux? what's that?" Most consumer laptops do not have official support for Linux, and many of them have various bits of hardware (looking at you, Dell, and the fingerprint sensor on my old laptop) that don't work on Linux at all. Yes, Framework has advertised some Linux support, but I think it's been pretty clear that Windows is their priority. And regardless... Linux works fine on Framework laptops. Also consider that "Linux" isn't just one thing: realistically Framework can only test one or two distros; if you want to run something else, you're quite reasonably on your own, and should try to repro issues while running the supported distros before blaming Framework.