farawayea

Not as far as I know. One can look up a certain motherboard or laptop to check if it's compatible with Linux before buying it.

The author had hardware with known compatibility issues. They've decided to make some rather strange choices, including the use of NTFS as a file system for their data. I don't want to gaslight them or say their experiences aren't relevant. Someone with experience with Linux knows to do research before they buy hardware to avoid such surprises. Expecting NTFS to be usable and a great experience under Linux is also not a reasonable expectation overall. The choice of distribution matters a lot as well. Some are better and some are worse.

It's hard to understand how someone who claims to have a lot of experience with Linux would go back to Windows. They may have been in fact primarily a Windows user if they're willing to put up with Microsoft's spyware, SSD crashing bugs, dark patterns and ads.

The article itself appears to have been edited or written with an LLM. This article is even less relevant due to the apparent AI slop.

This device has planned obsolescence written all over it. The pen includes a built-in rechargeable battery. The device's battery is also not user replaceable. These are the same issues that the Remarkable Paper Pro has.

They use the Linux kernel and some GPL software. They've made a change with Remarkable Paper Pro to only allow SSH access once the user has put the device in "developer mode". The device is marked as compromised until it is restored to factory or something else is done to it. It's not clear to me how the device is restored to factory or restored at all.

They provide tarball dumps via https://github.com/reMarkable/linux-imx-rm instead of a proper git repository for the kernel. Why is it so hard to find people able to push a git repository to Github? These dumps are also rather useless if they still lack the source code for the frame buffer and the display. https://github.com/reMarkable/linux is the Linux kernel for the older remarkable 2 and the remarkable 1. The kernel code from the Github repository for my remarkable 2 wasn't the one they shipped in the latest version running on my device a few months ago. There was a newer minor patch version running on my device.

The devices are very tied to the cloud account and their application. You must have an account and you must use their application if you want to use this device fully, even offline. The network over USB feature makes it possible to back up/download/restore documents. EPUB document handling is abysmal without their application installed on the PC. They really want their customers to use their software, to have an account and to use their cloud services. It's a non-starter if you really don't want to be locked in. EPUB documents still have issues on my Remarkable 2 due to the bugs their USB based document transfer tool has. Many documents simply fail to transfer without any feedback. They probably only update the account-based software they force people to use to get as much money from subscriptions as possible.

Hardware repairs for these devices are also not looking good. You're most like out of luck if the warranty has expired for your device. They couldn't care less. They’ll gladly sell you yet another device which has to be recycled when the battery isn’t able to hold a charge for more than a few minutes.

I wouldn't recommend any product from this company. This company's good old days are over. They've taken money from investors. They want to charge their customers as much as possible. The en*****ification is almost complete.

It is unfortunate if you want to deduplicate and encrypt in the target backup.

Do you plan to fix https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549?

There's no such desktop PC which offers 128 GB of VRAM. The Framework Desktop doesn't do that for the time being. It's not yet available.

There will be more options by the time this becomes available.

It is indeed better than the Mac. It's still 1000 times worse than a regular desktop PC which lets people swap RAM modules, the CPU, add a dGPU and so on.

I'm aware of all the limitations they've brought up and how it was sold to the public. It's not as if someone forced them to build this product. They've chosen to build it this way.

This product goes against their principles of building products which are more environmentally friendly. They've done this for the laptops by not forcing people to buy a new laptop when their motherboard is dead or no longer fast enough for the software they run. It's also possible to replace the keyboard, the hinge, the battery, the RAM, the wifi module, the SSD, the touchpad, the case, the display and the expansion modules.

This Framework Desktop 1st gen can have the following components replaced: wifi, SSD, CPU fan, maybe the heatsink, some front panel IO modules, some decorative tiles on the front, the PSU and some parts of the case. A single broken regulator or failing memory chip forces the owner to replace the entire computer. One is forced to replace the entire thing if they have no option to get someone to find the relevant part, desolder the existing one and solder the new one on. This is also not an option for the CPU.

This means that any kind of damage forces the owner to buy another board with CPU and RAM soldered on it for about the same price as the entire thing with the case.

This Framework Desktop computer can be repaired just like most laptops with soldered RAM by replacing the entire motherboard with CPU and RAM. Why would I downgrade the desktop PC's repairability down to that of a laptop? The tradeoff isn't worth it for that price.

There's absolutely nothing repairable about this computer. The motherboard is the entire computer. Only the storage can be replaced.

Do you plan to make computers which can actually be repaired? How exactly is the Framework Desktop any better than what Apple is doing with the Mac? I prefer to build my own machines. Why would I ever choose such a product which can't have parts replaced over something better which enables me to repair and upgrade my computer?

I ask because you were on "Buy now!" which also tackles greenwashing. I fail to see how this product is any better than all of the disposable junk sold by other companies (soldered RAM, soldered CPU, no PCI-E, no second NIC, no expandability of any kind).

Do you plan to sell products with PCI-E ports for dedicated GPUs and other devices?

Has Framework's customer support improved? Do you plan to do something about that? I've read countless posts from people who state they didn't receive a reply from Framework's customer support or that their hardware problems were never resolved. Why should a new customer trust your company?

It seems that the Framework Desktop 1st gen has a 4x PCI-E port. That's not exactly useful for a GPU. I've learned this after watching the LTT video.

This is a cool product for people who want a lot of RAM for LLMs. Those like me who build their own systems would get better value out of a machine they've built.

The only parts which can be customized for this product are the presence or absence of a handle, the cooler's fan, the case's side and some front tiles. That's it. The m.2 SSD and the wifi are the only components which can be replaced.

This isn't the kind of product I wanted Framework to make. I was hoping they'd make hardware which can be repaired and which has components available for it. The motherboard has all the chips and everything else soldered on it. The most expensive part of the computer needs to be replaced if a voltage regulator or some other part found on the motherboard fails. There's no cheap $ 100-200 motherboard to replace in this product. It's the same problem as with Apple's Macs.

Can someone at Framework answer this question: what do the customers do with your Framework Desktop hardware once it breaks and you no longer support it? It's e-waste. What happens when the motherboard in my computer dies? I buy only a replacement motherboard while keeping the RAM, the CPU and GPU, unlike for Framework Desktop. What happens when the GPU I have is no longer useful or supported? I buy only a new GPU.

This board doesn't even have PCI-E for a GPU. This product is only good as long as the iGPU provides the required performance for whatever application is of interest. This is a weakness the Framework 13 motherboard shares. There's no way to remove the board from its case to use it with a PCI-E x16 GPU with the right PSU.

AMD is known to abandon their customers once they release newer dGPUs and SoCs with iGPUs. This can be easily observed if you review the countless reports for crashes with amdgpu on Linux. The amdgpu driver has various bugs which lead to crashes of the GPU or of the entire machine. They're also not good at shipping CPU microcode for consumer CPUs to address hardware bugs and CVEs.

As a side note, even the Framework AI HX laptops are extremely expensive for what they offer in terms of hardware. A laptop which goes above $ 2000 without RAM, an SSD, a charger and without any adapters for those bays seems to be a good deal? That's absurd. There are laptops with 32 GB of RAM, the same CPU, better displays, a 1 TB SSD, a charger and all the required ports present on the laptop for less than $ 2000 (including taxes).

I hope someone from Framework reads this. I want repairable products which can be upgraded without replacing a monolithic part which is the entire computer.

Other noteworthy things

- their site went down hard with a queue to see the site... downright absurd

- they haven't posted the specs of the Framework 12

- there are still no actual repair centers which repair their products, no physical stores or sellers which sell Framework products outside of their site

- there have been reports of people who didn't have their hardware problems with Framework laptops addressed, even LTT addressed such issues

This is all fluff. It doesn't provide any proof such as links to these changes.

Thanks. I understand where you're coming from now. Your requirement to use Python code for automation could be satisfied by an external component which uses the Home Assistant API or through some internal custom Python based component which runs your code for automation.

The current setup for automations isn't good for anyone - not for end users, not for developers. I've resorted to using the UI because it seemed to be less likely to break across releases.

It's a major pain to write YAML for Home Assistant. Some parts of Home Assistant lack complete examples which are up to date. The documentation doesn't include examples for every single thing. Part of writing some automations was just a lot of trial and error, looking things up on the Internet, validating the configuration, and restarting Home Assistant. It's just not a great experience.

Discovering what has to be selected to use as an action in the automation GUI is another nuisance. The most recent example is with a light I wanted to set to 20% brightness. I had no means to find something with the keyword "brightness" or anything similar. It turned out that this was exposed as turn light on.

Breaking changes are their own source of friction. My only advantage has been that many of my automations are now just GUI automations with some custom YAML where it can't be avoided.

All of these things are far beyond what a non-technical user could be able to do. It can be difficult even for someone who knows how to look things up, read documentation and update everything when breaking changes are made.

Home Assistant isn't the kind of tool one can put in someone else's hands to use it without additional maintenance or supervision. It's also not the tool to use in any commercial setting due to its countless problems.

Tuya's entire business model is about getting their customers' data and getting them to pay for their services through vendor lock-in. They're not going to give up on all that juicy data collection and on the money they currently charge.

Those are just the direct dependencies as far as I can tell.

The frontend has its own dependencies.

Home Assistant and the Home Assistant Operating System have a log of bugs, regressions, shortcomings and usability problems. They have far too many problems for me to even track them or write all of them down. That's not related to your experience. There are other issues which stand out based on what you've written.

The so called issues you've encountered appear to be due to insufficient knowledge and experience. It might be a good idea to learn more to better understand what's going on. What you've done is similar to complaining about being last in a swimming competition without learning how to swim properly first and without proper practice for several years.

As I've written in the other comment, the Home Assistant Operating System is useless without an Internet connection. It has to pull the Docker images since it doesn't have any version of the images at all.

Yes, there are resources loaded from the Internet. The map tiles are loaded from a third party in the initial setup and every time you view the map. Icons are loaded from https://brands.home-assistant.io/. https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 is the issue.

This thing isn't as private and as local as it is claimed to be. It's very tied to services provided by Nabu Casa, including the very visible cloud integration of theirs. They've expanded it now to backups.

A fresh Home Assistant Operating System installation is useless without an Internet connection. It needs to download several gigabytes of Docker images for it to be usable.

It's very likely they'll take the infrastructure down if they sell their business or go out of business. Home Assistant OS will be completely useless in such a scenario.

The more likely scenario is that someone installs Home Assistant OS, sets it up with the current version and uses it as it is to avoid breaking changes. Their storage or the entire device breaks down. They'll want to install the same version to restore a backup. They'll learn the hard way that it's not possible to bring up what they had before.

Using the Docker image is the only choice which mitigates this risk.

The Home Assistant core container relies on resources hosted at https://brands.home-assistant.io. Those are cached in the browser for a while. Your mobile phone and web browsers still load the icons. They can do whatever they like with these bits of information. This includes selling allegedly anonymous Home Assistant usage data. The people who host their infrastructure can still do that without their knowledge since they claim it's a CDN.

The use of this CDN means that an existing Home Assistant core based setup can stop displaying some icons if those icons are removed. This can happen if someone decides to use a specific Home Assistant core version.

How do you like the Discord based forums? Having knowledge buried in a proprietary closed source platform hosted by a third party is another problem. They can wipe out countless posts and exchanges through a simple terms of service update to delete older data.

The automated issue closure and ignored issues are pretty much the last straw for me. I appreciate the work done. I can't help but see that this how things are going to be forever without any significant change. The only option is to migrate away from Home Assistant.

https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements... lists all the direct dependencies installed in the container.

It's enough for just a single direct or indirect dependency to be compromised to have a botnet or turn it into something used for surveillance against the users.

Preventing it from exfiltrating data by isolating it from the network with Internet access is the only option if you want to run it. This requires local only devices.

Accessing it through the web UI or through the mobile app will still load icons from https://brands.home-assistant.io. The details are in this ticket https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549

This isn't some regular contributor. They appear to be one of the most important Home Assistant maintainers and a Nabu casa employee. This contributor is also the author of many release note blog posts such as this one https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/01/03/release-20251/

Home Assistant may be developed with financing from Nabu Casa. Nabu Casa receives money from partners, from people who buy their products and from those who pay for their cloud subscription. They also rely heavily on countless other Python packages developed and maintained by people they don't pay. Other people make significant contributions to Home Assistant and to its web UI.

I'd expect them to run this project as an open source project and handle such situations with a bit more grace, even more so for someone with such a high profile such as frenck.

They'd have the right to get angry if someone distributed a paid product which didn't include FOSS code from third party contributors or FOSS dependencies. This isn't the case. They use a lot of FOSS code from countless people already for the Home Assistant core, for the frontend and for the Home Assistant OS.

All of the time spent dealing with such needless drama could be better spent living one's life and doing something more meaningful for everyone.

I've been using Home Assistant for about three years. I was very glad it exists. I wanted to make the most out of it. It has numerous problems and regressions are very frequent. The disappointment lies in it not being as it's described and in the fact that its development process doesn't appear to improve, nor does its overall quality appear to improve. It still gains new features in spite of all of these issues.

Home Assistant's dashboards and UI have regressions in every single release. Many such regressions aren't fixed quickly or remain that way permanently. Github issues get closed by the bot. New features ship in every release without fixing these bugs. This gave me the impression that the developers employed by Nabu Casa have very little time to focus on bugs and that there's no pre-release QA. The graphs and their history had plenty of bugs in the 2025.1 release. Are there plans to improve the development process to improve quality?

Home Assistant is described on its home page as "Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.". A Home Assistant OS download is useless offline and without the Nabu Casa infrastructure. A download of a Home Assistant OS image obtained today would be completely useless in 5 years for now. These are completely useless if Nabu Casa's infrastructure goes away for any reason. Do you have plans to address this?

Another point related to Home Assistant being local and making privacy a priority, Home Assistant downloads all icons from [1]. The GitHub issue [2] has been open for a while without any involvement from the developers. The Home Assistant container image doesn't include all the assets required for it to provide a Home Assistant deployment in a container. Is this something you plan to address or should it be handled in a fork of Home Assistant meant to be run completely locally?

Home Assistant bundles numerous dependencies [3]. The Home Assistant container bundles and has all of these available. Are there any plans to let users disable all cloud only integrations? What's done to assess the security of these numerous packages? This matters because people allow Home Assistant to access their indoor cameras, door locks and other potentially sensitive devices. Some malicious code run from one compromised dependency's __init__.py could have serious consequences.

Home Assistant is a Python monolith. Adding something as simple as a shell command to my configuration requires a restart of Home Assistant. Are there any plans to split this up or to improve the architecture to not have such issues anymore?

The energy dashboard is extremely limited. Are there plans to make this more flexible?

Why are you forcing people to use encryption since 2025.1? I was including these backups in my encrypted backups anyway.

The voice functionality for Home Assistant and voice PE require a cloud service or a local machine with a GPU for good performance. Are there any plans to address this to provide higher performance local voice control? The old Rhasspy (the version released before Nabu Casa hired its developer) seemed to work a lot better with defined sentences and was faster.

I've seen Home Assistant become faster over the last three years. My YAML had to be updated a few times. New features have been introduced to the dashboards. Old issues and limitations are still there. The dashboards gain new features while the number of bugs and regressions also increases. The custom resources for custom cards don't always load in the mobile app. The UI still loads all the icons from the Nabu Casa icons site [1]. Home Assistant frequently stops updating my location (home vs away) and requires deletion of the device from HA to get it to work again. Entities don't update in the dashboard sometimes.

Home Assistant is described as being an open source project which has been donated or moved to the Open Home Foundation. Why does it still require a CLA to be signed, just like corporate open source projects?

Setting up Home Assistant for someone who's non-technical is a terrible idea. This is an even bigger issue if they want it set up and left alone without updates/maintenance. The mobile app would probably stop working properly with this installation or they'd break it at some point by installing updates.

I'll wait for a bit longer while I prepare to migrate away from Home Assistant and Home Assistant OS. I'm considering a setup which uses Home Assistant core to trigger automations and to display a dashboard. All the automations and device integrations would be done with other tools. This would reduce exposure to Home Assistant's regressions and avoid Home Assistant OS's limitations.

[1] the Nabu Casa run icons site - https://brands.home-assistant.io

[2] https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549

[3] Home Assistant Python requirements https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements...

Some of these instructions have fiber glass or similar for insulation which appears to be used for this. It's not something anyone would want next to their ventilation system or inside it.

This isn't something to even consider without some expert reviews. The projects are also work in progress and overall incomplete with many details missing.

Be careful when you do anything involving ERV and HRV. It's very easy to cause serious damage to the property you live in, harm yourself and others in an irreversible way, or even both.

Their tech may be more than adequate today. Bigger businesses may not buy from a small startup company. They expect a lot more. Illumos is a less popular OS. It wouldn't be the first choice for the OS I'd rely on. Who writes the security mitigations for speculative execution bugs? Who patches CVEs in the shipped software which doesn't use Rust?

They've built this a while ago. A hardware refresh takes time. The good news is that they may be able to upgrade the existing equipment with newer sleds.

Yes, you can. Can you boot them from external drives when their internal SSD is dead? This isn't about booting them when their OS is wiped out.

Having a dead SSD seems to kill these computers. That's expected for something with soldered flash chips.

I've watched that guy's video. The Apple arm64 Macbook Pro doesn't even charge without a functional SSD. I suspect it also doesn't boot off anything else if its main SSD is dead.

That's not a solution when your main SSD dies. The system no longer boots. The guy from the youtube video explains that as well.

Normal computers with NVMe storage will always be more repairable than Apple's hardware with everything soldered on the board.

Does this still have soldered flash chips for the SSD? This would've looked a lot better without the soldered non-upgradable SSD. It's not great at all.

This guy will probably have a lot of clients https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3N-z-Y8cuw.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just replace the 7 speakers with something else?