In case you haven’t heard the news, Framework went and publicly sponsored Hyprland the most toxic part of Wayland by a country mile) and openly shilled Omarchy multiple times (the pet project of fascist shithead David Heinemeier Hansson) recently.
In response to well-justified backlash against this, founder Nirav Patel responded with FOSSbro platitudes about “[creating] a big tent" for open source”.
If you’ve got any more updates on this self-inflicted shitshow, put them here so they can be collected in one place.
(In retrospect, that AI-pilled Framework Desktop should’ve been a major red flag they were gonna pull this shit.)
I am still not completely sure why this product should exist in their lineup. Their laptops have always focused on being more repairable/upgradeable than most competing laptops, but the Framework Desktop is actually less repairable/upgradeable than a standard desktop that you can build yourself however you please. Though if you instead compare it to a mini PC form factor like an Intel NUC, it is actually a very attractive alternative. Either way, at the end of the day, no one asked for this device. People enjoy Framework for the things that they are doing to make the laptop industry more consumer-friendly. But apparently the reason that the Framework Desktop was developed is just because the CEO saw AMD’s new CPU platform and thought “I want to put that into a Framework product.” And after they tried working with AMD to get standard memory modules to work with it, instead of saying, “Oh, there’s no way to make it repairable/upgradeable? Never mind, we just won’t make a Framework product out of it,” they went ahead and did it anyway.
Maybe they’re competing with the old Mac desktops, the cheesegraters before they were made completely proprietary. Now, I’ve always dissed Apple consumers for buying a phone that’s 50% more expensive and 20% less powerful or feature-filled than the competition, but once I learned the going price of Mac desktops are 300% more expensive than the most capable custom, my mind was blown.
And yet Apple’s success and following is proof that Framework’s desktop might follow suit.