For some time now I was looking for a device to replace my Thinkpad. Its a 14" device, but thats to big for my taste. I am a big fan of small notebooks, so when frame.work announced their 12" laptop, I took the chance and ordered one right away.

I was in one of the very early batches and got my package a couple of days ago. When ordering, I chose the DIY edition, but in the end there was not that much of DIY to do: I had to plug in the storage and the memory, put the keyboard in and tighten some screws. There are very detailed instructions with a lot of photos that tell you which part to put where, which is nice.

My first impressions of the device are good - it is heavier than I anticipated, but very vell made. It is very easy to assemble and disassemble and it feels like it can take a hit.

When I started it the first time it took some minutes to boot because of the new memory module, but then it told me right away that it could not detect an operating system. As usual when I want to install a new system, I created a GRML live usb system and tried to boot from this USB device. But the Framwork BIOS did not want to let me boot GRML, telling me it is blocked by the current security policy. So I started to look in the BIOS where I could find the SecureBoot configuration, but there was no such setting anywhere. I then resorted to a Debian Live image, which was allowed to boot.

I only learned later, that the SecureBoot setting is in a separate section that is not part of the main BIOS configuration dialog. There is an “Administer Secure Boot” icon which you can choose when starting the device, but apparently only before you try to load an image that is not allowed.

I always use my personal minimal install script to install my Debian systems, so it did not make that much of a difference to use Debian Live instead of GRML. I only had to apt install debootstrap before running the script.

I updated the install script to default to trixie and to also install shim-signed and after successful installation booted into Debian 13 on the Framwork 12. Everthing seems to work fine so far. WIFI works. For sway to start I had to install firmware-intel-graphics. The touchscreen works without me having to configure anything (though I don’t have frame.work stylus, as they are not yet available), also changing the brightness of the screen worked right away. The keyboard feels very nice, likewise the touchpad, which I configured to allow tap-to-click using the tap enabled option of sway-input.

One small downside of the keyboard is that it does not have a backlight, which was a surprise. But given that this is a frame.work laptop, there are chances that a future generation of the keyboard will have backlight support.

The screen of the laptop can be turned all the way around to the back of the laptops body, so it can be used as a tablet. In this mode the keyboard gets disabled to prevent accidently pushing keys when using the device in tablet mode.

For online meetings I still prefer using headphones with cables over bluetooth once, so I’m glad that the laptop has a headphone jack on the side.

Above the screen there are a camera and a microphone, which both have separate physical switches to disable them.

I ordered a couple of expansion cards, in the current setup I use two USB-C, one HDMI and one USB-A. I also ordered a 1TB expansion card and only used this to transfer my /home, but I soon realized that the card got rather hot, so I probably won’t use it as a permanent expansion.

I can not yet say a lot about how long the battery lasts, but I will bring the laptop to DebConf 25, I guess there I’ll find out. There I might also have a chance to test if the screen is bright enough to be usable outdoors ;)