[HN Gopher] Open-Sourcing our Firmware
___________________________________________________________________
Open-Sourcing our Firmware
Author : aram
Score : 679 points
Date : 2022-01-21 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (frame.work)
(TXT) w3m dump (frame.work)
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| Excellent news, can't wait to play with the new firmware. I will
| echo the Fedora 35 recommendation from the article. Ran a liveusb
| of it for a week or so on this laptop and it was buttery smooth.
| All components that in the past I had mixed experiences with
| (wayland, pipewire) just work.
| smasher164 wrote:
| I've been running NixOS on my Framework for the last few months,
| and I've been really happy with it. I initially got it so I'd
| have viable hardware to do osdev on, so learning that they are
| going to open-source its firmware makes me even more happy.
| TallonRain wrote:
| I'm curious what the build quality is like. I've heard some
| complaints about QA and reliability issues with the hardware,
| but I don't know anyone in person who owns one of these
| devices. What has your experience been like?
| smasher164 wrote:
| I haven't had any hardware issues tbh. The only thing I would
| say is that the fans kick in pretty loud when doing anything
| remotely intensive. Even battery life has been fine, compared
| to my old Macbook Air. I've had to put in some work
| configuring drivers, since they're so new that they haven't
| landed in the distros yet. But NixOS makes that easy, so
| that's about it.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Same here. I own two Framework machines and haven't had any
| issues so far.
|
| I also own an M1 air without any issues, but there was a
| class action lawsuit claiming that people were getting
| inordinate numbers of cracked screens
| (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-macbook-
| cracked-s...).
|
| I haven't noticed inordinate fan noise running windows 10.
| rnk wrote:
| Seems too good to be true. Reasonable prices, upgradable, no
| soldered ram. So has it been a reliable Linux laptop, what's
| the battery life with your options?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| From what I've heard battery life is much worse on Linux than
| Windows. If you're willing to spend some time hacking around
| you can close the gap a bit, but it'll still be a gap.
| james-redwood wrote:
| I've found this to be variable in my personal experience
| based on OS, hardware, and use of TLP.
| sva_ wrote:
| Personally I can't confirm this. I've recently replaced the
| battery on my 2014 Thinkpad, and on low brightness I get
| around 8h of battery. That is of course, while not doing a
| lot of compute (compiling).
|
| I don't think this was much higher, back when I used
| Windows all those years ago, so I'm not sure what people
| are saying with low battery with Linux? I don't see how
| Windows could get me much more? And why would it?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| If you have a Thinkpad, then the issues with the
| Framework (CPU sleep states, needing to turn of secure
| boot to hibernate properly, power management issues in
| Framework BIOS 3.06, etc) wouldn't necessarily apply to
| your laptop
| sneak wrote:
| The screen is very low-res and the GPU is weak. This is why I
| don't have one.
|
| If you don't care about pixels (seems common in PC-land),
| this is probably a good thing re: power consumption.
|
| I look at text all day, every day, and want it to be high
| res. It's been high res on my Macs for half a decade, and my
| XPS is even better. I'll get one of these once they fix the
| screen.
| aquova wrote:
| The Framework has a 200 DPI screen. It's lower than say a
| MacBook, but I wouldn't consider that to be "low-res",
| especially in the laptop space.
| jonaustin wrote:
| This 'low-res' comment makes no sense, I'll never go back
| to 1080p, but 2256x1504 is plenty IMO for text (I live in a
| CLI all day pretty much).
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Especially on a 13" screen. I have an XPS 13 with a 4k
| screen and I never use it at native resolution undocked
| because I'd need a magnifying glass to read anything on
| it.
| sneak wrote:
| You're always using it at native resolution, you're just
| adjusting your renderer settings.
|
| Nobody's saying your fonts should be tiny. I'm saying
| they should be rendered in high resolution.
|
| I have the same computer and display. I run it at 4k
| native but nothing is small, no magnifying glass
| required.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| > You're always using it at native resolution, you're
| just adjusting your renderer settings.
|
| No, when I wrote 'native resolution' I meant 1:1 pixel
| mapping, which is pretty obvious by context. Nobody has a
| laptop with a CRT on it these days.
| sneak wrote:
| Once you get used to 220+ ppi, it's very difficult to go
| back.
|
| I even don't like my 218ppi displays that much, they are
| a little fuzzy compared to my 300+ ppi displays.
|
| It's not a matter of opinion what is "low" or "high" when
| dealing with integers for resolution. It's evident that
| you think a low-res (by 2022 market options) display is
| sufficient. That's fine, but it doesn't make it high res.
|
| There are people who think an analog serial console with
| 24 lines and 80 columns is sufficient resolution for
| text. That's not what's being discussed: simply the
| resolution of the display in the computer. It's low by
| modern laptop standards.
| _zooted wrote:
| Having come from elementaryOS I can say that Fedora 35 is
| awesome. So much better!
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Having come from Debian, Ubuntu, and Manjaro I settled on
| what feels like the last distro I will use on my own
| systems: NixOS. It's not so much better, it's so much
| different.
|
| Every(ish) single package, every single line of
| configuration(ish) is under version control in a(couple)
| nix files. I share (most) of it between my systems. With
| flakes (and it's lockfile) it's a 100%(ish) deterministic
| system.
|
| Downside: The language is arcane to me and the tooling is
| dogshit. Not that I could've made it any better, but
| running my config repo through entre to rebuild on every
| write to get some promiscuous error nobody has had before
| sucks major D.
|
| Therefore I still have an Ubuntu container (because every
| desktop application targets Ubuntu) running with X11
| forwarding for the few packages that aren't in nixpkgs that
| I wanna run.
|
| I also don't use home-manager, but chezmoi for my dotfiles.
| Since I want my home configuration to work on MacOS and
| other distros I might SSH.
|
| Atomic upgrades and downgrades are such a great feature I
| don't know how people can live without it now that I've
| experienced it.
|
| Note: The default configuration NixOS gives you is also
| shit, out of the box they don't ship a system like you'd
| want to consume it (nixos-generate-config). An anecdotal
| example is that Avahi isn't installed by default, which
| means chromecasting won't work until you figure out that
| you need Avahi, i18n config is shit too.
|
| So it's not all green grass, but definitely worth it, since
| every Nix line you write is an investment into making your
| experience better "forever" (I don't see NixOS going away
| anytime soon, very healthy activity on the project).
|
| Now after praising NixOS for awhile, let's praise the
| developers of all packages that are compiled into the
| lovely distros you all use. For me the KDE team can't get
| enough praise, the software is so damn good.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| > I also don't use home-manager, but chezmoi for my
| dotfiles. Since I want my home configuration to work on
| MacOS and other distros I might SSH.
|
| FYI, home manager works on MacOS just fine. I usually
| tell people to start with Home Manager as I think it's
| the best gateway drug to Nix stuff at the moment.
| [deleted]
| bo1024 wrote:
| You nailed it, battery is the only downside I've had, not
| awful but probably say 3 hours of video playback, or 5-6
| hours of web use. Haven't used it unplugged all that much so
| very rough guesses. Bigger problem with my fedora install at
| least is battery draining while the lid is closed.
|
| Overall great machine
|
| Edit: I may be missing software updates that improve this, no
| idea
| reacharavindh wrote:
| I very much wanted to hear about this and damn :-( Video
| playback must be hardware accelerated by now and be super
| efficient. Another worry was about low power sleep modes
| and waking up, and looks like it is not solved too. I might
| have to suck it up and buy the Mac for my needs after all.
| I have my trusty Linux desktop for all my big compute
| needs. I was hoping to make the mobile machine also run
| Linux, but the specific needs there (crisp display, nice
| battery life, Linux friendliness) seems to be an elusive
| goal.
| xvector wrote:
| The M1 MacBook Air honestly feels so far ahead of any
| other laptop I've used that it's not even funny. Fanless,
| powerful, absolutely bonkers battery life.
|
| M1 + Nix is ideal, IMO.
| nathancahill wrote:
| You have Nix running on M1?
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Nix is the package manager, NixOS is the OS.
|
| https://nix.dev/tutorials/install-nix#macos
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| It's still a real pain to get hardware accelerated video
| in a browser on Linux. Google is still outright refusing
| to support it in chromium, even though they do support it
| inside Chrome OS. There are few community patches
| floating around if you're willing to roll your own
| chromium to enable to Chrome OS hardware decode pathways
| on generic Linux.
|
| You can mostly get it working on Firefox if you play
| around with the config options, but it only works with
| AMD and Intel GPUs (anything supporting vaapi).
| fubbyy wrote:
| Really? I'm pretty sure chromium has decent VAAPI
| support.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| * crisp display
|
| * nice battery life
|
| * Linux friendliness
|
| Not elusive at all, you can find an M1 MacBook Pro at any
| Apple, Best Buy, or Costco store.
| Kinrany wrote:
| M1 are not Linux-friendly at all.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| You can't even run unsigned apps on your M1. There is
| linux support slowly coming thanks to the fine folks on
| Asahi, but it is very pre-beta.
| dheera wrote:
| I've been using a Framework laptop for a month on Ubuntu
| 21.10 and pretty happy with it. Some hiccups but mostly
| answered by digging through forums.
|
| Battery life in operation is excellent, but it does drain 30%
| in 8 hours when on suspend which is a bit much. Not a
| dealbreaker but hope this can be solved.
| BlackLotus89 wrote:
| > cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
|
| If deep isn't selected do so and try again. You could have
| problems with your nvme coming out of suspend though.
|
| I got similar problems on my pinebook pro, but sadly this
| is all too common.
| addcninblue wrote:
| Out of my element here, but would be curious to see if this
| is something solvable in firmware (now open-sourced!) or if
| it's a hardware problem to begin with (power states? etc).
|
| Edit: Also curious if this issue is generally a hardware or
| firmware issue in most laptops, or if it's a mix of both.
| 4cao wrote:
| Could be caused by Modern Standby (by default newer
| laptops remain on even when nominally off, which has been
| known to cause issues). Some more details here:
|
| https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/145891-how-check-if-
| mode...
| throwaway2568 wrote:
| High battery drain during standby on Linux can be due to
| the system not entering the proper sleep state. I had this
| happen to me on an AMD machine lately, in that case
| disabling secure boot solved the issue.
|
| Here is a pretty detailed blog post in checking if that is
| the problem and how to deal with it on intel systems
|
| https://01.org/blogs/qwang59/2018/how-achieve-s0ix-states-
| li...
| tata71 wrote:
| > disabling secure boot solved the issue
|
| Lovely...
| sydney6 wrote:
| I can imagine that the power draw in S3 could come from
| having (replacable) DDR Memory instead of (mostly soldered)
| LP-DDR Memory.
|
| edit: typo.
| bestouff wrote:
| The problem is that current Intel laptops don't use S3
| anymore, they use S0ix a.k.a. "modern standby", an
| abomination where the CPU doesn't really sleep and the
| battery drains fast.
|
| Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. all have the same problem.
| sydney6 wrote:
| I have a Thinkpad X1 from 2018 and by default it came
| with S0ix enabled and Lenovo later on added the S3 sleep
| state option through a BIOS update, called "Linux
| compatibility something".. Before that, one had to
| manually edit the DSD table to get rid of this evil
| burning-sleeping-laptop-in-backpack-feature called S0ix.
|
| Does the Framework Laptop, or other popular models from
| the other manfacturers you mentioned, not have a S3 sleep
| state option these days, i.e. S0ix only?
| bubblethink wrote:
| So it was believed that S3 is deprecated on TGL, but it
| probably works. I remember reading about it on some
| coreboot channels. Starlabs may have enabled it. Grep for
| S3 on https://support.starlabs.systems/kb/bios-and-
| firmware/bios-a...
| fancy_pantser wrote:
| A thread from two weeks ago gave me pause; I will wait a couple
| iterations until considering a Framework laptop to see if at
| least the software issues can be resolved and observe how the
| team navigates the waters.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29806430
| COGlory wrote:
| That thread does not mirror any of my experiences at all, and
| I've been using the laptop since it was launched.
| nrp wrote:
| We took that feedback and wrote step-by-step guides on setting
| up a few popular Linux distributions, calling out what items
| work out of the box and what needs manual workarounds. For now,
| we recommend Fedora 35 as the best distro to use where
| everything works out of the box, and Ubuntu 21.10 as a second
| option that works though requires some workarounds.
|
| *
| https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Fedora+35+Installation+on+th...
|
| *
| https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Ubuntu+21.10+Installation+on...
| floatboth wrote:
| Ooh, they use chromium ec, nice. Where is its serial console
| accessed? :)
| yuuta wrote:
| Good news for learning as well. I had never seen an open source
| EC firmware before, and I'm curious about what's inside that.
| quesera wrote:
| See also:
| https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/ec
| akomtu wrote:
| I wish frame.work offered CUDA compatible GPUs and/or AMD CPUs.
| prophesi wrote:
| On the bright side, there have been reports of people getting
| their Framework to work with an external GPU.
| ohazi wrote:
| I've been so happy to see what Framework has been doing lately,
| and really want to support them, but I already have a desktop as
| my primary computer and two Thinkpads that are already set up
| nicely, but that I rarely use. I moved from 15" laptops to 14"
| when Lenovo added the numpad on the larger variant, and 14" is
| about as small as I want to go.
|
| I kind of want to buy a framework though, just to support them?
| But I have no use for another laptop, let alone a small 12" one!
| Should I get one anyway because, what the hell, why not? Should I
| wait and then jump on one if/when they release a larger model?
|
| Anybody else have similar feelings?
|
| Edit to add:
|
| I also have one of the last Thinkpad models that support S3 sleep
| (T480 -- within a model or two, I think?), which is currently
| super critical for Linux... I need to be able to close the lid
| and come back after a week.
|
| It's easy to blame the manufacturers for this, but the consistent
| answer seems to be "Intel's Tiger Lake _platform_ does not
| support S3 sleep, " and all of the system builders base their
| work on what Intel's reference platform does. So short of going
| to extreme effort to hack it together themselves (something that
| is likely not their specialty), reasonable sleep behavior is not
| going to be an option unless Intel brings S3 back, or does work
| to improve the S0ix states.
|
| I absolutely do not want to support the no-more-S3 clusterfuck
| right now.
| gtsop wrote:
| Similar feelings, yes. I don't mind the size at all. It's just
| that I've got a sweet thinkpad x13 already. My next laptop
| though, surely a framework (if they are still around)
| joelthelion wrote:
| Sell your Thinkpads and buy one of their laptops?
| mmastrac wrote:
| Adding my vote: I'll definitely jump on a Framework 14+" here.
| My eyes cannot work well w/a 13" without glasses. If I had
| better near vision (will be all over the lens-softening eye
| drops) it would be a different story.
| [deleted]
| staindk wrote:
| FWIW I don't think you should buy a laptop from them just to
| support them.
|
| Just adding to e-waste down the line, and I'm sure they are
| selling enough units.
|
| In the future when you do actually need/want a new laptop of
| course it would be great to support them then. And advocate for
| them when a friend asks about what laptop to buy.
| ohazi wrote:
| Completely agree about e-waste, and as a result, I try to
| take good care of my laptops and use them for as long as I
| can (I used my previous one for about a decade, and it's
| still perfectly usable plugged in / for light tasks).
| imiric wrote:
| From reports I've read the Framework laptop has poor build
| quality. This comment from here actually:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29807585
|
| I'd like to support their cause, but like you, I have way too
| many machines that already work well enough, that I can't
| justify another purchase unless it would offer a substantial
| improvement over my current setup (old ThinkPads). Plus I
| really can't function without a Trackpoint ;)
|
| So I'm holding out a generation or two to reconsider. I hope
| they improve.
| vaylian wrote:
| > From reports I've read the Framework laptop has poor build
| quality.
|
| Sources please. That's news to me.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Yeah, the cited source doesn't rea mentioned build quality.
| It's mostly software bugs, muffled speakers and fan noise.
|
| None of that is build quality.
| ask_b123 wrote:
| From the cited source:
|
| > Build quality is clearly a step down from my old
| Thinkpad X1 Yoga. The hinge doesn't feel as strong, some
| keys are mushy/creaking and I'm skeptical my Framework
| will survive as many falls as my old laptop.
| sangnoir wrote:
| That is not the same as saying the build quality is poor
| though: it's clearly a comparative statement. "The Tesla
| Model S is cheaper than the Model X" does not imply "The
| Model S is cheap".
|
| Replacing "Model S" in the sentence with a beat-up '97
| Honda civic and it may be true, but there is not enough
| evidence contained in the sentence to support an absolute
| statement.
| xvector wrote:
| If a "hinge doesn't feel strong" and the keys are "mushy
| and creaky" that 100% indicates poor build quality.
|
| Perhaps our individual thresholds for quality differ, but
| either one of those two statements are dealbreakers for
| me.
| imiric wrote:
| I would categorize the laptop not turning on for 2 weeks,
| poor speakers, fan noise, mushy/creaking keys, and weak
| hinge all to be part of build quality. And yes, software
| issues are also a problem.
|
| We can argue about how subjective all of those points
| are, and if a single report has any merit on its own, but
| it was enough to disuade me from making the purchase.
|
| If I could test the laptop locally before buying it, I
| would do that. Otherwise I don't want to risk it on a
| first gen product, since I _can_ wait for gen 2 and 3.
| neurotrace wrote:
| I've had my laptop for a while now and haven't noticed any
| build quality issues. It definitely feels nice and light but
| it seems sturdy enough. I'm not in the habit of dropping my
| laptop on the ground but I do chuck it on to the bed from
| time and to time and it doesn't seem any worse for wear.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Are you talking about personal testimonials, or published
| data?
|
| If it's published data, mind sharing a link?
| imiric wrote:
| It was a recent thread here on HN. Let me see if I can find
| it...
|
| This comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29807585
|
| Some of these issues could be subjective, and I shouldn't
| decide based on that single report alone, but it was enough
| reason to reconsider the purchase, especially since, like I
| said, I really don't need a new machine.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Thank you for sharing!
| duck wrote:
| I would say all that is subjective regarding what they
| specified as "build quality". I'll add my own take to it
| - I got mine early last month and haven't noticed any of
| those. That said, I do think the battery is the weak
| spot, but I think part of that is on the OS side (I'm
| running Pop!OS).
| stormbrew wrote:
| > From reports I've read the Framework laptop has poor build
| quality.
|
| I'm gonna be really honest here and say that people have a
| very distorted subjective idea of what a 'sturdy laptop' is
| like. A lot of marketing money has been spent to make people
| think the only way to have a strong object is for it to be
| made of a rigid metal or glass material, so people go "oh my
| god the lid can FLEX this thing will break if I drop it!" but
| that's not at all how things work.
|
| The truth is you can't really just guess at whether a thing
| will survive falling or whatever by looking at or touching
| it. The only thing that tells you anything really is actual
| experience and/or testing.
|
| (personally, I think my framework laptop feels plenty sturdy
| for all the subjective anecdata that's worth, it's just not
| designed in a way that's trying to scream at you "you can run
| it over with a truck and it will work perfectly")
| adamweld wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a laptop that gets great battery life on
| Linux and has a good keyboard?
|
| I've been thinking about selling my current beefy laptop (razer
| blade 15) since I end up doing all my MCAD/ECAD work on my
| desktop anyway, and moving back to Manjaro on my laptop which
| only really gets used for software/firmware anyway.
|
| But, I read so many horror stories about linux firmware
| glitchyness and poor battery life that I gave up on the idea.
| If I can just by a used thinkpad from a few generations ago
| that might be perfect.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I get decent but not amazing battery life on my XPS 15,
| running Pop_OS. About 5-6 hours of actual use time. No major
| firmware issues but it is using Nvidia.
|
| XPS 15 laptops appear to have an unresolved mouse lag issue
| that is noticeable under linux (but seems to happen in
| Windows too). Seems to not happen with external mice.
| Annoying but not a big deal. There is an open issue for it
| but no patch yet.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| My ThinkPad x270 runs perfectly on Linux out of the box
| (including Bluetooth, webcam, etc.), and with the larger
| 9-cell battery (+ the smaller internal battery it comes with)
| it ran almost 20 hours for normal coding usage when new (less
| with other usage, and of course it's gone down a bit since,
| but can still work a full day on it).
|
| It should be said I run a pretty minimal system (dwm, st,
| Vim, stuff like that) and usually throttle the system to
| "powersave", mostly because the fans will never spin up with
| it. It's a bit slower, but still plenty fast enough for me.
| alufers wrote:
| Sorry for changing the topic but does anybody know the reason
| Intel has removed the seep states?
|
| It drives me absolutely nuts when I open my bag and feel the
| heat coming out of it, and my laptop is left with 20% charge.
| ohazi wrote:
| I believe the push came from Microsoft.
|
| Apple has been able to do "clever" things while asleep, like
| waking up the wifi chipset periodically to check for email /
| messages / notifications / updates, so that when you wake up,
| everything magically feels ready to go instead of feeling
| like you just woke up from 1984 and have reams of crap to
| download.
|
| But this only works well because Apple does their own
| firmware for most of the machine, and seems to do a
| reasonably good job, despite a few issues. They're careful
| about only doing things that aren't going to obliterate the
| battery in a way that would be surprising.
|
| Microsoft is jealous of this functionality and knows they
| want something like that for Windows. They also know they
| need to cater to the lowest common denominator with system
| builders, so they asked Intel to put this kind of capability
| into their platforms, and to _explicitly disable_ the old
| modes, so that system builders wouldn 't be able to drag
| their feet. The result is that they've all switched, but the
| outcomes are generally poor and high variance. Sometimes
| they're passably okay within Windows, but not always. It'll
| probably get better, but for now things are crap, especially
| on Linux.
| khimaros wrote:
| invest in the company financially
| raybb wrote:
| It doesn't seem like that's possible right now:
| https://community.frame.work/t/investing-in-
| framework/3980/1...
| [deleted]
| taf2 wrote:
| I'm hoping for a 16" or 15" version and then i'm in
| 656565656565 wrote:
| What's with the sticky scrolling on this site? (Safari at least)
| 656565656565 wrote:
| Add blocker was blocking cookie pop up, after disabling and
| acknowledging the pop up the problem disappeared even with
| blocker re-enabled.
| option wrote:
| I wish I could get one without Windows
| option wrote:
| You have to pay for Windows.
|
| Quote from their website: " Base and Performance configurations
| ship with Windows 10 Home pre-installed and Professional ships
| with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed. You can also load your own
| operating system later, like a Linux distribution."
| Shared404 wrote:
| The DIY Edition has a no OS option.
| m0ngr31 wrote:
| You can
| option wrote:
| All configs list Win10. what am I missing? Of course I can
| buy with Win paying for it and then re-install.
| COGlory wrote:
| You want the DIY edition.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Pretty sure from other discussions I have seen that it's
| only the DIY version that has an option for no OS, then you
| install Linux yourself
| zmk5 wrote:
| This is the version you are looking for:
| https://frame.work/laptop-diy-edition
| pantalaimon wrote:
| You can even get one without a drive
| kop316 wrote:
| Does the Framework support coreboot? IIRC it does not, and I was
| sort of surprised to not see that in this announcement.
|
| Their github also doesn't have any mention of coreboot:
| https://github.com/FrameworkComputer
|
| And it isn't here either:
| https://doc.coreboot.org/mainboard/index.html
| nrp wrote:
| We called out "We're continuing to invest in open source
| firmware development, with the goal of replacing other
| proprietary firmware we're currently stuck with in the future
| too." in the blog post. Coreboot is something we're very
| interested in and have done experimentation around. We went
| with an off-the-shelf proprietary BIOS/UEFI to derisk launching
| the Framework Laptop on time and satisfying the core goals on
| it (getting a high-performance, thin, light laptop into the
| world that is fully repairable and upgradeable), but an open
| BIOS/UEFI solution is absolutely in line with our philosophy.
| mjg59 wrote:
| Are you planning to ship systems that don't have Boot Guard
| enforcement enabled? I've done a couple of Coreboot ports
| (I'm typing from a laptop that's running my build) and the
| Framework is an extremely interesting target, but if Boot
| Guard is turned on then that becomes pretty difficult.
| nrp wrote:
| We haven't finalized our plans around this, but one path we
| have explored is a signed shim loader.
| mjg59 wrote:
| Ah, so a signed firmware bootblock that runs something
| user signed? I wrote the original version of the boot
| Shim that Linux distros use for bridging from the
| Microsoft root of trust to the distro one, so let me know
| if there's any way I can help out here.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| IIRC they said that it was a point of interest but not
| something they'd started work on yet.
| trwired wrote:
| This is not related directly to the announcement, but touches on
| a thing that infuriates me to no end - for some reason the site
| assumed that because I live in the EU and relatively close to
| German border, I speak German and presented the site in that
| language. Despite my high-school teacher's heroic efforts, I can
| at best understand a few basic phrases. I didn't even know what
| to click in the cookie pop-up to kindly ask them to not track me.
|
| Language auto detection^W assumption is such an anti-feature.
|
| /rant
|
| edit: I see I am not alone, who got hit by this.
| TillE wrote:
| Google is particularly bad about this, they basically make it
| impossible to get normal English-language results if you're in
| another country, unless you mess with the URL parameters
| (gl=us).
|
| Like if you're in Germany, you can set Google's language to
| English, but you're gonna get mainly German results for any
| search. A bizarre choice.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It's myopic by google. I speak more than one language,
| "belong" to more than one country, but google makes it very
| hard to find relevant results that are not narrowed-down to
| the country I'm in right now.
| terhechte wrote:
| I'm German, I live in Germany, and I too hate this behaviour.
| I rarely want out of date badly translated variations of the
| original US topics.
| uoaei wrote:
| I'm surprised things like "preferred language" aren't built
| into HTTP yet, seems to have a natural home in the user-agent
| corner of that world.
| nightfeather wrote:
| Actually there is a header for this purpose [Accept-Language
| on MDN](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...).
|
| But some sites just don't care about it and try detect this
| base on other information.
|
| edit: formatting
| dskloet wrote:
| I believe Google (used to?) ignores it if it's set to only
| English because that's too often the default. If that's the
| case, the work around is to set a second preferred
| language.
| U1F984 wrote:
| There is the Accept-Language header:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...
| [deleted]
| dskloet wrote:
| I guess this is sarcasm but if not:
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...
| uoaei wrote:
| Surprise! Not everyone on HN is in webdev. I don't know
| much about how this all works but surveyed my user-agent-
| switcher utility and found no such language options.
| 4cao wrote:
| No need for any add-ons or extensions, you can set it the
| browser directly, although most websites these days
| ignore it anyway.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| It's actually controlled by the Languages setting in your
| browser. Both Chrome and Firefox let you set the list of
| languages sent in the header, along with the order.
|
| Doesn't exactly do a lot of good. Sites tend to ignore
| it, at least from what I've seen.
| uoaei wrote:
| The first thing I do on any new installation is peruse
| the settings and tweak to my liking. It seems I missed
| that option, being privileged to have English as a mother
| tongue.
| dskloet wrote:
| The option should be in your OS or browser settings.
| [deleted]
| oever wrote:
| Accept-Language: fr-CH, fr;q=0.9, en;q=0.8, de;q=0.7, *;q=0.5
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...
| AcidBurn wrote:
| I believe HTTP has had this feature since 1999 as the Accept-
| Language header defined in the HTTP/1.1 RFC[0].
|
| As for why it does not get used, MDN suggests[1] it's because
| changing it may lead to fingerprinting but there are likely
| other historical reasons.
|
| [0]:
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2616#section-14.4
|
| [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...
| 4cao wrote:
| It's not because you're close to the German border. Apparently
| anyone anywhere else in the EU except France gets redirected to
| the German website. (France is the only other EU country where
| Framework decided to open sales.)
| temp12913231 wrote:
| chrsw wrote:
| It's getting harder to resist buying one of these.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I love these guys. I sincerely hope that they are successful and
| stick around. Keep up the good work!
| donkarma wrote:
| now lets get an open source baseband
| grishka wrote:
| Osmocom is a thing, but no idea how good it is. I've seen
| articles about people running cellular networks with it.
| p_l wrote:
| The real issue is certification and so on. The people running
| small cellular networks tend to have necessary permissions or
| operate within certain limits.
|
| For public, general usage baseband, it will need to be at
| least tamper evident and you won't be able to just run your
| own.
|
| I'd personally be fine with _auditable_ baseband (i.e. you
| can always verify what code it runs, then let 's say compare
| to public code tree and build hashes), with possibly a
| signature scheme that would link builder and certifications.
| Then if you went to the trouble of proving you have the
| necessary qualifications and won't break shit, you could sign
| with your own certificate and take responsibility.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| I bought a Framework for personal use and love it so much. I have
| it running Windows 11, if only because it was easier to get
| longer battery life out of it without doing endless tweaks on a
| *nix OS.
|
| Upsides:
|
| - Hardware feels VERY premium and nice. It's not too heavy. You'd
| never guess it's the first laptop made by a new company.
|
| - Keyboard is a pleasure to type on. I did nanowrimo last year on
| it and wrote ~60k words and never had a complaint.
|
| - Company and its mission are awesome! Support team is very
| helpful and their communication has been great.
|
| - Guides on the website for opening it up and replacing/fixing
| parts is amazing. If anything I hope I can keep this thing
| running for many many years.
|
| - Choosing what ports you want via the expansion cards is really
| nice (USB-C charging on BOTH sides of the laptop?!?! amazing)
|
| Downsides:
|
| - Battery could be better. I get probably 3-6 hours on Win11
| depending on what I'm doing.
|
| - It can get HOT. I have the i7 processor; doing light dev work
| with a few Docker images running and VSCode with a medium-sized
| Node project open, it gets uncomfortably warm on my lap and the
| fan occasionally spins up. I played through Inscryption on it
| (awesome indie game, built in Unity) and the fan was EXTREMELY
| loud during the whole thing because it was making heavy work of
| the integrated graphics card. Just browsing the web or watching
| videos it is cool and silent, though.
|
| - Because of issues with Tiger Lake, S3 sleep isn't supported so
| if it sleeps when you close the lid, the battery will continue to
| drain for a bit and eventually it'll go into hibernation. I set
| mine to just go into hibernation when the lid is closed which
| saves the battery more if I'm on-the-go. It takes around 11
| seconds to wake from hibernation which isn't bad. Not an issue
| with the Framework specifically, I think this affects all Tiger
| Lake processors.
|
| - Expansion cards are a bit of a novelty for me. I have 2x USB-C,
| 1x USB-A, 1X HDMI and don't see myself changing that any time
| soon and can't really think of any expansion cards I'd need in
| the future.
|
| Looking forward the question at the top of my mind is "will this
| actually be upgradeable?"... if they ever release AMD or ARM-
| based processors, it'd be great to try them out, but you'd have
| to swap out the whole mainboard which is a bummer (but
| understandable given the hardware constraints). Different screen
| sizes would require a whole new laptop but at least you could
| bring along the internals. A touch screen would be really nice.
| alexott wrote:
| Just a suggestion for site - separate language from currency. For
| example, for me it's much faster to read in English, but I'm
| paying in euro...
| ignaloidas wrote:
| Side note: the language selection is stupid on the website. No,
| I'm not from Germany, and I don't speak German even if it's the
| closest country to me that you sell laptops in. Also, it's a bad
| practice to associate flags with languages. Or to give options
| that don't work after you select them.
|
| Otherwise, very nice news!
| schleck8 wrote:
| Do you have an alternative iconography for language selection?
| It undoubtedly makes the UX better, especially with many
| languages
| Beltalowda wrote:
| They don't have a language selector, they have a region
| selector which sets the appropriate currency, VAT (presumably),
| and also language, yes. It's an entirely appropriate usage of
| flags.
| 3np wrote:
| It is not. I can be present in Germany and want my laptop
| delivered there. That does not mean I speak a word of German.
|
| Language and physical location are disjoint. Even worse when
| I know the original content is in English, my preferred
| language, but someone decides I only deserve the partial
| translation.
| schleck8 wrote:
| You can switch the region then, it takes 3 seconds and
| persists across visits.
| 3np wrote:
| Sure, and now I can not select shipping destination
| "Germany" anymore, as somehow it's an impossibility to
| match the existing language contents and shipping
| destinations...
|
| This is such a frustrating trend. Google has already been
| mentioned as an offender - it is an annoying procedure to
| keep resetting the language for every fresh session - but
| at least their texts are mostly properly translated...
| Going to the Amazon site of my country (a smaller one
| where I am a native speaker of the language and most but
| not all products listing are machine-translated), I have
| to constantly change my language preferences to get the
| non-machine-translated version of various texts, as
| "prefer original language" doesn't seem to be a thing.
| Some things are just so hilariously wrong that doing this
| is the only way to make sense of everything.
|
| Oh, and they (framework) also force the currency tied to
| the nation. My credit card is not necessarily in the
| native currency of either my shipping destination or my
| preferred language. Just let us set all three
| independently, please :/
|
| aliexpress and iherb are two sites that do this right.
| redthrow wrote:
| > Also, it's a bad practice to associate flags with languages
|
| There's even a website for this issue
|
| http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/why-flags-do-not-re...
| laputan_machine wrote:
| Disagree, examples in the blog are poo. English comes from...
| England... why shouldn't be represented with an English flag?
| Spainish comes from... Spain... why shouldn't be represented
| with a Spanish flag? There are Spanish speakers in literally
| every country in the world, what is the solution?
|
| The Hindi argument is not good, Hindi is the _official_
| language of India. I work with people from various parts of
| India and they can all communicate with each other because
| thry all speak Hindu/English (usually a mixture in
| conversation), even if their main language is Malayalam.
|
| There are issues with flags = languages (e.g. "Welsh":
| "Gaelic" for instance, or Switzerland (which one?), but for
| English/Spanish examples, they are not good ones to use
|
| And to end this, just because there is a website for your
| issues doesn't mean it's correct. There is nothing preventing
| someone from making a website called flagsarelanguages.com
| and having poo counter points to the original websites poo
| arguments. Appeal to authority nonsense.
| polar wrote:
| > Hindu is the _official_ language of India
|
| Hindi, not Hindu. Also, Hindi is not the only official
| language of India.
| laputan_machine wrote:
| Thanks! It was a typo, I've corrected it
| zild3d wrote:
| Don't think the site is going against these. It says "Choose
| Location and Language" and offers for example:
|
| - :us-flag: United States [USD]
|
| - :ca-flag: Canada (English) [CAD]
| kilburn wrote:
| The issue there is that "being in country X" and "wanting
| to see the site in language Y" is going to be against some
| users' preferences. Examples:
|
| - Canadians from Quebec may prefer the site in french (but
| use CAD as a currency and see Canada's taxes where
| relevant).
|
| - Expats in Thailand very much prefer to use the site in
| English.
|
| - I'm in Spain and my browser is setup to reflect my
| preferences (Catalan first, English if that's not
| available, Spanish last). I prefer English to Spanish
| because international companies either have a strong
| presence here (and will probably have Catalan as an option)
| or their Spanish translation will be worse than the
| original language in English which I understand better than
| low effort translations.
|
| Frame.work is going for a locale selector but they don't
| even support all the official locales of the regions they
| already operate in (e.g.: they don't support fr_CA). Even
| if they did, there are always users that would prefer a
| "non-official" localization (en_TH, en_ES following my
| examples above).
|
| In the end they would be much better off letting users pick
| the language, region and currency separately. It's less
| effort from their part and a better solution for the users.
|
| In that case, flags for languages are bad and flags for
| regions are fine but can still rub against some users'
| feelings. Example: pro-independence Scots having to pick
| the UK flag. Is it really that terrible to have auto-
| complete and/or select fields for these 3 things?
| kstenerud wrote:
| What it should offer is two separate options: One for the
| store location, one for the language. This becomes
| especially important in Europe because you have so many
| people who live in a country where they don't speak the
| associated language natively.
|
| This is such a basic UX rule that I'm a bit surprised to
| see them fumble on it...
| kingcharles wrote:
| I agree that flag != language (British Union flag for English
| being a prime example), but what is the next best alternative?
| amelius wrote:
| > what is the next best alternative?
|
| This:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30028593
| looperhacks wrote:
| This doesn't help the user choose a language. The language
| my browser sends to the website is not necessarily the
| language I want to view the webpage in.
| amelius wrote:
| Then you have to change your browser settings.
|
| https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-
| prioritie...
| rg111 wrote:
| Anything but the flag.
|
| Why not use full language names?
|
| I am very tired of seeing one flag represent my language
| where that is the newer nation using that language as
| national language. But that language is spoken for a thousand
| years or more in other regions.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I am very tired of seeing one flag represent my language
| where that is the newer nation using that language as
| national language. But that language is spoken for a
| thousand years or more in other regions.
|
| I'm not disagreeing with your general point, but I'm
| curious: What language is over a thousand years old and
| still recognizably the same language?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > What language is over a thousand years old and still
| recognizably the same language?
|
| Latin.
| rat9988 wrote:
| Arabic
| badLiveware wrote:
| Icelandic and old norse perhaps
| Hjfrf wrote:
| US English comes to mind, not that middle English is
| particularly readable.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I was thinking of English as a _counter_ case when I
| wrote the comment:) Skimming the history section of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#History ,
| I don't think I would really describe anything before
| "Early Modern English" (1500-1700) as meaningfully the
| same language; if you took a modern English-speaker and
| gave them a sample of Middle English, they wouldn't be
| able to read it, and if you stuck them in a room with a
| speaker of ME neither would be able to understand what
| the other person was saying.
|
| Although in fairness, it does now come down to a semantic
| argument about what counts as the same language, and I
| acknowledge that a reasonable person could disagree with
| my narrower view.
| a_t48 wrote:
| "Englischmen theyz hy hadde fram the bygynnyng thre
| manner speche, Southeron, Northeron, and Myddel speche in
| the myddel of the lond, ... Notheles by comyxstion and
| mellyng, furst with Danes, and afterward with Normans, in
| menye the contray longage ys asperyed, and som vseth
| strange wlaffyng, chyteryng, harryng, and garryng
| grisbytting."
|
| This is...difficult to read, but once you realize that th
| == th, it's semi comprehensible. Looking up some Middle
| English on Youtube, it's also semi comprehensible. I
| doubt I could have a deep philosophical conversation with
| an ME speaker, I think we could make eachother
| understood.
| runnerup wrote:
| > Although in fairness, it does now come down to a
| semantic argument about what counts as the same language,
| and I acknowledge that a reasonable person could disagree
| with my narrower view.
|
| I really enjoy Jamaican patois for this. Arriving there,
| try as hard as I could...I couldn't understand a single
| word of it, even though it was ostensibly "English-
| enough" that I should have been able to. The first 5 days
| spending time in groups speaking the local language felt
| like anywhere else that I couldn't understand -- Saudi
| Arabia, Portugal, Guatemala, etc.
|
| Right around the one week mark, something just 'clicked'
| and I could understand pretty much all of it as if it
| were regular English except for the true slang. Really
| felt like "dialect" on the cusp of become "language".
| Very cool spot for a language.
| KeytarHero wrote:
| > Why not use full language names?
|
| If I end up on the page in a language I don't know, then
| how would I find the language selector?
|
| I agree that flags aren't great, but I don't know of any
| other solution to this problem.
| grishka wrote:
| I've seen English represented as a flag made of halves of UK
| and US flags
| [deleted]
| uoaei wrote:
| We've had two-letter designations for languages for a long
| time now.
| darrenf wrote:
| Two letters in the Latin alphabet, I assume - does that
| assist those who primarily read Cyrillic, Greek,
| Vietnamese, Arabic, Thai, Tamil, ... ?
|
| Localisation basically never has a simple "we should
| just..." solution.
| uoaei wrote:
| I'm sure if Mandarin were the default language, English
| speakers would quickly learn to recognize the character
| for "English" and be able to find/click it on a webpage
| without too much hassle.
|
| Language comprehension is unnecessary when all you need
| to do is recognize a character.
| flatiron wrote:
| "Please select your ISO language code" /s
| ignaloidas wrote:
| Why have flags at all? Just use the native language name and
| a translation.
| KeytarHero wrote:
| If I end up on the page in a language I don't know, then
| how would I find the language selector?
|
| I agree that flags aren't great, but I don't know of any
| other solution to this problem.
| scj wrote:
| More problematically, in a character set you don't know!
|
| Iconography is required.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > but what is the next best alternative?
|
| Use the user locale. Expressed as a geographic region (which
| you can use to compute the best possible region to serve the
| user from) and a language (used to render the page).
|
| If you do it correctly you can support weird combinations,
| such as a German speaker living in California (expects prices
| in USD). Or the country of Switzerland (one territory, 4
| official languages).
| brightball wrote:
| Yea, it's always a struggle. UI wise it clearly looks better
| to use flags and people know what it's for when they see it.
| There's always people who complain about it though.
|
| I'm of the opinion to not worry about it and just use the
| flags. It's enough effort to properly internationalize a site
| and keep it maintained. That it's available at all is a huge
| effort. Debating flags vs a drop down with languages is
| nitpicking IMO.
|
| Plus, when the language codes include a country it's a
| natural UI decision.
|
| EDIT: Supporting multiple languages increases the complexity
| of the entire development pipeline. Translation teams are
| brought in, translation tools are brought in to support in-
| code language as well as translations in the database itself.
| Every new text snippet needs to be translated to each
| language to deploy it.
|
| Your search features get more complicated, date formats,
| number formats, currency, collations. Every language you add
| increases this complexity. Because of that, you will
| represent a language with a primary country and not every
| language spoken in that country. On the chance that a company
| has opted to go all in to support region specific dialects of
| languages where 100+ choices will be listed, then no...of
| course flags wouldn't work. But in most cases you're lucky to
| get 2 languages at all with potential for a couple more for
| all but the largest of companies. Virtually every other site
| is just going to use one and churn out some Google
| translations or ask you to do that yourself.
|
| After considering all that, yes...just use flags.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Plus, when the language codes include a country it's a
| natural UI decision.
|
| Un-natural UI decision then if a language can exists in
| more than one country, and one country can have many
| languages?
| anyfoo wrote:
| As someone who grew up multilingually in Europe but now
| lives in the US and works for a US company (which seems to
| get localization right), I have the impression you don't
| really know the confusion and difficulties that arise from
| what you are saying.
|
| To explain, let's turn it around. Assuming you also live in
| the US, imagine a EU company would make the following
| assumptions that are common (to the point of feeling
| entirely "natural") in lots of European countries, but
| wrong in the US, and think about how that could impede you
| in varying business situations:
|
| * There is only one time zone in a given country.
|
| * VAT and other sales taxes are the same over the whole
| country (and therefore just included in the display price).
|
| * Every debit card, credit card etc. has a PIN, and a
| common API to the bank for card/bank-specific verification.
|
| * Every bank account is identified by IBAN, even across
| countries. Wiring money is always free.
|
| * Decimal separator is universally "," and grouping is ".".
| (Bonus: Let's instead be in an Asian country where it's
| common to group digits by 4 instead of 3.)
|
| * Dates are always either in order "DD MM YYYY" or ISO
| YYYY-MM-DD. In the case the year is omitted, "DD MM" is
| assumed and no clarification is ever made. Your appointment
| is 4.5., thanks for doing business with us! Sincerely
| yours, noreply@example.com.
|
| * Car-related business: You have to be at least 18 to drive
| a car (and have spent the equivalent of thousands of
| dollars and many hours of mandatory theoretical and
| practical training). It is illegal to drive a car more than
| 2 years without a thorough inspection that forces you to
| fix even minor things (Autobahn speeds are dangerous), so
| old cars are uncommon. There are special enthusiast
| registrations for so called "oldtimers", but that still
| requires extra maintenance.
|
| * Gastronomy-related: But you're allowed to drink beer at
| 16 (was at least the case when I was that age), anything
| else 18.
|
| * You have to use/publish your real name, address, and
| other information mandatorily in a lot more situations
| (e.g. when hosting a website of any kind--imagine a
| business enforcing that for all customers).
|
| You may find that if you want to do business
| internationally at all, you have to start caring about
| those things.
| dheera wrote:
| With flags you also have the issue of how to represent
| politically disputed regions e.g. Taiwan even when the
| languages used locally are pretty clear-cut.
|
| In the specific case of Taiwan, if you want to maintain
| good business relations with normal civilians on both sides
| of the straits you need to represent Taiwan as a state to
| Mainland China IPs and represent it as a country to
| Taiwanese IPs and most of the rest of the world.
|
| I'm not advocating any particular political view, this is
| just the technological fuss you have to go through to
| maximize the number of happy customers. So sometimes it's
| much easier to just forget the flags, state the language
| and currency directly as text, and skirt around these
| issues.
|
| As for language selection, I really don't think it's
| necessary to beautify it UI-wise. Pick based on the user's
| Accept-Language header and 99.99% of the time you'll
| present it exactly as the user wanted without them having
| to select anything. You can then implement a text-only
| language selector somewhere in a less conspicuous place,
| such as the footer, than polluting your navigation header.
| temp12913231 wrote:
| galgalesh wrote:
| Yeah, just use flags and confuse the fuck out of
| multilingual countries. Belgium has Dutch, German and
| French as official languages. So what would a Belgian flag
| mean? What flag should I choose?
|
| If I choose the flag from the Netherlands to get Dutch,
| I'll probably be confused by a whole bunch of terminology
| since the dutch of different countries differs vastly more
| than the English from different countries.
|
| "People who complain about flags are nitpickers" is a
| perfect way to say "I grew up in a gigantic monoculture
| where you can drive 5 hours in any direction without
| encountering a different language, if you ignore the
| natives"
| brightball wrote:
| If Dutch, German and French were supported languages on
| the site I imagine that flags of the Netherlands, Germany
| and France would be representing the language selection.
|
| As a US citizen I often visit sites that use a British
| flag to represent English. I don't bristle because
| there's not a US flag or question whether the US flag
| should also be referencing Spanish.
|
| It's just a detail to draw your eye that otherwise holds
| no importance once that is accomplished.
| kmorgh wrote:
| Except Belgian "Dutch" is called Flemish. And is
| different enough from the other Dutch to warrant its own
| i18n.
|
| Belgium is an exceptional case but I'm sure you can find
| more.
| Insanity wrote:
| Can't say I recall a moment of really being confused by
| the terminology used in NL vs BE. But I do agree, a
| Belgian flag means nothing in terms of language. The flag
| can be used but only as a prefix to the actual language
| in text (to visually filter quickly).
| philipprk wrote:
| Really hoping for the laptop's next iteration to have a reverse T
| for the arrow keys. Otherwise very solid laptop, would be my
| first non-Mac choice.
| capableweb wrote:
| Wow, you're right! Didn't understand how you could not have a
| reverse T for the arrow keys and took a look at the pictures.
| The up/down keys are split in half?! Why'd you make the arrow
| keys have different sizes?!
| yurishimo wrote:
| It was the design on MacBook's for almost 5 years. Apple
| rolled that change back in late 2020 but it will take other
| OEM's a while to update their available SKUs to match the
| Apple of today.
| smoldesu wrote:
| My ex-boyfriend called me "insane", but I genuinely prefer
| ye olde 6-key arrow cluster from the Thinkpads of yore. I
| quickly got used to browsing with pgup and pgdown, now any
| keyboard without those keys adjacent to the arrows just
| feels wrong to me.
|
| In any case, the keyboard on the Framework is fully
| replaceable. If there's significant enough demand for an
| inverted-T cluster, you can bet there are people who will
| make the replacement for it (if OEM doesn't get to it
| first).
| Eduard wrote:
| And I hate the ThinkPad 6-key cluster because of
| accidentally hitting the pgup and pgdown buttons. I
| decapped both buttons because of it. Same with the the fn
| button next to ctrl.
| bubblethink wrote:
| So that's where all this comes from. Not surprising. I saw
| that Dell announced a touchbar product. Guess they'll have
| to kill that too. This sort of slavish aping of Apple needs
| to stop.
| varispeed wrote:
| This is I don't understand. Why laptop manufacturers neglect
| probably the most important thing that is the keyboard? Almost
| every single laptop that comes out these days looks like the
| keyboard is an afterthought. Why can't I have full size cursor
| keys? Pg Up, Pg Down, Home, End and few others?
| tomtheelder wrote:
| I suspect majority of users never touch Pg Up/Pg Dn/Home/End
| and all those other keys over there. For arrow keys, the
| compacted layout is helpful when designing a space
| constrained keyboard, and it's totally usable.
| varispeed wrote:
| Wouldn't that be because these keys are difficult to use in
| typical laptop keyboard, as in self fulfilling prophecy?
| franga2000 wrote:
| It probably doesn't help, but it definitely isn't _the_
| reason. Most people still do their work on desktops with
| full-sized keyboards and they already don 't use those
| keys there.
| varispeed wrote:
| So how they e.g. move around cells in the spreadsheet or
| documents?
| franga2000 wrote:
| Mouse. If you're correcting data in a spreadsheet you're
| probably jumping around a lot and a mouse makes more
| sense and if you're entering new data most people I've
| worked with use tab and enter.
| dsego wrote:
| fn+arrow combo is imho equally as usable
| moondev wrote:
| In theory you can just buy the keyboard and swap in when/if it
| becomes available https://frame.work/marketplace/keyboards
| bbojan wrote:
| Because I'm down the rabbit hole of highly customized
| keyboards, at one point I did a frequency analysis of the keys
| I use the most.
|
| Guess what was the most frequently used key? Cursor down
| followed by cursor up.
|
| For example, cursor down was pressed ~2.5x more times than
| space, or ~4 times more than letter E, which is was the most
| frequently used letter.
|
| Guess what are the smallest keys on a Mac-type keyboard (the
| layout also used by the Framework laptop). Cursor up and down.
| Madness.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Keep in mind this is likely unique to CLI users. The vast
| majority of users have little use for arrow keys - nudging
| the text cursor a few chars left/right and making tiny moves
| in graphics software are about the only two I can think of.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Do you scroll with the arrows keys?
| tata71 wrote:
| You don't?
|
| Either that, or PgUp/PgDown
| walteweiss wrote:
| I am on a Mac for over a decade and I don't understand what's
| the issue with the keys. Well, they are smaller, but it's not
| a problem for me, not at all.
| junon wrote:
| Note to the website developers: currency != language. I'm an
| American in Germany. My handle of the language isn't (yet) great,
| thus I still work with English primarily. However, I pay in EUR
| exclusively.
|
| Just the same (not that it appears to be a problem with
| Framework, though it's easy to make the same mistake), country !=
| language.
| marcodiego wrote:
| What is the reason behind closed firmware? I understand that wifi
| devices may operate out of the certification depending on what
| the firmware does, but other devices... why do they have closed
| firmwares?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Probably to hide/protect corporate secrets, or if the firmware
| integrates proprietary code from a 3rd party it would be
| difficult to open source for legal reasons.
| p_l wrote:
| To give an example, a huge issue over all of the OpenSolaris
| lifetime at Sun was reportedly due to third party licensed
| content Solaris had by itself, which is why OpenSolaris
| source contained only the very base system and was stripped
| of certain stuff (including X11 server Xsun, iirc)
| Shared404 wrote:
| Also in the case of Wifi/Bluetooth it seems like FCC
| regulations would make having open firmware difficult due to
| the fact that it would make it easier to allow end users to
| broadcast on arbitrary frequencies. This way they have
| deniability.
|
| ...That said, not a subject matter expert so take this with a
| grain of rock salt.
| kelnos wrote:
| That feels like a false excuse a manufacturer might make,
| as it seems plausible enough, but doesn't really hold up to
| deeper scrutiny. Even wifi chips that have closed firmware
| usually have a region setting, and there's nothing stopping
| you from selecting a region that includes frequencies that
| aren't allowed in your actual region.
|
| Sure, that's not quite the same as allowing completely
| arbitrary frequencies, but that feels like a distinction
| that wouldn't matter much when it comes to government
| regulations.
| p_l wrote:
| FCC doesn't prevent you from opening the firmware (now,
| trade secrets inside is another thing) - they just do not
| allow unlicensed devices i.e. you can't just build your own
| radio firmware and have it operate legally.
| Shared404 wrote:
| So open firmware from the manufacturer is fine, but if
| you were to modify it and re-flash it yourself you would
| be breaking the law?
|
| I guess that makes sense, thanks for the clarification!
| p_l wrote:
| Exactly - the FCC certification is that a specific
| device, despite having purposeful (or accidental)
| transmitters, operates within the law and rules set by it
| for use of radio spectrum. The maker of the device is
| then able to sell it to people who are then indemnified
| should the device break those rules (and aren't required
| to have expensive in time and effort radio license
| themselves).
|
| With significant portion of the regulated behaviour being
| done in software, things can become a bit problematic if
| the end user can load any code they want. This is also
| why "BIOS whitelists" exist, as the certification applies
| to the whole radio equipment, which means the
| certification must cover the antenna - and those are
| built into laptops, meaning you can't certify the cards
| separately as their exact characteristics depend on the
| connected antennas.
| treesknees wrote:
| I don't think that makes sense at all. One major part of
| Part 15 from the FCC covers this. A device would fall
| under the category as an intentional radiator in part
| 15.1. And in part 15.23, considered a home-built device.
|
| SS 15.23 Home-built devices.
|
| (a) Equipment authorization is not required for devices
| that are not marketed, are not constructed from a kit,
| and are built in quantities of five or less for personal
| use.
|
| (b) It is recognized that the individual builder of home-
| built equipment may not possess the means to perform the
| measurements for determining compliance with the
| regulations. In this case, the builder is expected to
| employ good engineering practices to meet the specified
| technical standards to the greatest extent practicable.
| The provisions of SS 15.5 apply to this equipment.
|
| https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-47/chapter-I/subchapte
| r-A...
|
| This entire part from the FCC basically states you don't
| need a license to operate in the frequencies for wifi,
| bluetooth, etc. You're not breaking a law by recompiling
| the firmware for your wifi module to fix a bug. You'd be
| breaking the law if you did so with the intention of
| operating within licensed spectrum/power levels, for
| example.
| p_l wrote:
| The problem starts with the fact that the device doesn't
| have any way of showing that it was modified, and some of
| the frequencies involved _are_ license-restricted
| (especially in 5GHz wifi bands - 2.4GHz is dumping ground
| free-for-all because of aircraft ovens anyway).
|
| So, let's say you modify something with your own
| firmware, break rules about ISM spectrum - or worse, mess
| with SDR hard enough you break some licensed spectrum,
| and upon investigation FCC certification marks are found
| and the number. Since certification points to vendor,
| vendor now has to explain why their device went outside
| of those limits, and might or might not be able to prove
| that you ran it with unlicensed firmware.
|
| So an obviously home build device will go under SS15.23
| easily, but inconspicuously modified commercially sold
| device won't - without possibly long court case, that is.
| franga2000 wrote:
| The FCC is very familiar with inconspicuously modified
| commercial devices - hams have been doing it since before
| "firmware" was even a word. The fact that it's replacing
| some code on a chip instead of a shunt resistor on a PCB
| really doesn't make a difference.
|
| And if this really was really the main issue, it seems
| pretty easy to just sign the firmware - I'm pretty sure
| many vendors do it already.
| p_l wrote:
| Vendors also want to comply with slightly different rules
| all over the world, and ultimately the easiest way
| becomes to sign and verify.
|
| The code being secret is more of "trade secrets" than
| anything legal.
| wmf wrote:
| For BIOS/UEFI a lot of hardware vendors outsource their
| firmware to AMI and AMI keeps everything proprietary so they
| can keep charging money.
|
| (Coreboot is not an option for real computers because it
| doesn't have menus and various other things.)
| trulyme wrote:
| I would assume that building an UI with menus and whatnot is
| the easy part of it? (not an expert, genuinly curious)
| wmf wrote:
| It may be that writing the code is the easy part but caring
| enough to actually start on it is the hard part. There's
| been no visible progress on this... ever.
| bubblethink wrote:
| Coreboot doesn't deal with that, the payload does. And
| tianocore does come with a menu for changing boot order,
| boot devices etc.
| ad8e wrote:
| I checked the keyboard debouncing logic [0] and it was fine. Some
| keyboards from other manufacturers, notably Lenovo Thinkpads,
| have absurd debouncing algorithms that scramble keys or add
| delays, so it's good to see Framework has a correct solution.
|
| [0]:
| https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/EmbeddedController/blob...
| ohazi wrote:
| I've noticed that I seem to miskey my unlock password
| immediately after resuming from sleep way more often than when
| I use that password at other times, or when using an external
| keyboard (Lenovo T480). I always suspected that something was
| wonky, but a weird debounce bug would totally explain it,
| especially as I tend to type that password very quickly.
| ad8e wrote:
| The scrambling is easy to see once you know it's happening:
| press k and l simultaneously on your Thinkpad keyboard. It'll
| always come out "lk" unless you deliberately separate them.
|
| Testing was done [0], but it's not written in an easy-to-
| understand way. As a summary, Thinkpad keys are scrambled
| within 15-23 ms. Usually, humans ascribe scrambled letters to
| their own mistakes, but this time it's the keyboard's fault.
| Lenovo continues to ignore the issue.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/ad8e/input-polling-test
| poyu wrote:
| Debounce is an interesting topic[0], I tend to use hardware
| debounce whenever possible on my own projects.
|
| [0]: https://hackaday.com/2010/11/09/debounce-code-one-post-to-
| ru...
| nrp wrote:
| We used the chromium-ec logic as-is (checking git blame), but I
| believe did tune the debounce timer to match the
| characteristics of the keyboard itself.
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