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.)
EDIT (2): Found a solid summary of the situation, and a solid teardown of Nirav’s actions - recommend checking them out.
Well, I guess I’m at “we’ll see where this goes” stage, unfortunately, being the owner of a framework laptop that I absolutely love and have no intentions to get rid of and even if I wanted to I’m way too poor for that shit (buy nice not twice I understand F.Ws are expensive up front, still poor) that I bought as an upgradable laptop I can get (with my use case, longevity) prob like 15-20yr (no shit I can likely make it work as long as F.W exists, it replaced a 2014 toshiba and I got the 16 at launch [batch 15]), out of with upgrades to RAM/SSD, meaning I will continue to need some parts like bezels and expansion ports for a long time to come.
If there were like, any other companies making upgradable and modular laptops, and I had bought them instead, great, but that isn’t reality and so I’m kinda locked in here.
If a 3rd party started making shit (legally or not idgaf) like that and I can cut out the manufacturer, great. Also not current reality (beyond some actually pretty sweet .stl files.).
MNT are still good, right? IIRC, all firmware is open-source with no binary blobs, and they’re a small group of queers in Berlin. (Please tell me they’re not antideutsche tankies or something.)
looks good!
i would LOVE them to get an actual designer though. If ever a laptop looked like open source …
While I agree that the Hyprland community is toxic and led by an open conservative (if not fascist), citing Drew DeVault’s opinion piece is hardly better; he’s known for being a tankie with biases of his own and the way he manages sway is toxic in its own way (though, admittedly, not in the same manner that Hyprland is).
oh yeah totally, open transphobia and fascism is just as bad as being
known for being a tankie with biases of his own
the fuck is wrong with you. this is what centrism does to a motherfucker.
(and for the record, devault’s firmly wedged in my brain as a particularly dramatic neoliberal with a checkered past, but the fucker brings receipts (yes this is the same link in the OP that our guest decided to complain about, go read it because it’s fucking damning))
And Vaxry’s defense of the community was “actually, we harassed a transphobe a few months later.” Yes, great, you’re shitty to everyone. Yay.
Critical support for comrade DeVault in his struggle against western imperialism?
The real problem with leftist infighting is that if you call a different type of leftist a mean word, some ignorant liberal is going to call you the same word. And then a reactionary will call a liberal that.
tankie?
Is this the same Framework that develops very promising modular and repairable laptops, one of three companies to do so? If so… Fuck.
Yeah…
Who are the other companies?
- Shift, an ecoconscious, as-yet untainted tech brand from Germany
- I thought Lenovo, but I seem to be wrong - they were playing with concepts, nothing on the market yet.
- If you wish to buy from Shift you might need to enable a translator, as I believe their store is only in German.
- The only bone some people have picked at in terms of Shift’s ethical values is that they manufacture in China, but Shift maintain that their labour standards within the factory are kept high
I am often skeptical of tablet/keyboard hybrid designs (the PineTab 2 has not exactly been a roaring success for me) but that ShiftBook is straight-up a more visually appealing design than any Framework
Interesting, thanks, I hadn’t heard of Shift.
Nice, the shift phone is pretty well supported on postmarketos and their choice of firmware looks consumer friendly
These are expensive and not especially performant, though. Cool, but not the most practical choice on any kind of budget.
Agreed on pricing, but something this low-volume is always unfortunately going to struggle. The RockChip stuff is a current darling in the FOSS-compatible hardware scene, but I’m not super enthusiastic about it yet. If there isn’t an OS image you like, you’ve got to cobble one together with U-Boot and the DDR support blobs, which is a circa-1999 level of “fun”
Just my personal opinion but that thing looks ugly af
I’m not a fan of the rainbow keyboard but at least it can be turned off.
I think the transparent keycaps around the trackball are also contributing to the revulsion. Not sure why that does not seem to be a configurable option at the time of purchase, but there are probably aftermarket keycaps you could get if needed.
True, those aren’t my cup of tea either.
Yeah it wouldn’t be for me tbh. It looks like a luggable from the 90s. Their new one looks somewhat better but I think it is only available for preorder at the moment.
HP launched modular laptop, and Dell did a concept.
Of course, this is largely in response to Framework. Not like they’d do it on their own.
I am so sorry to tell you this, but its the exact same Framework developing modular and repairable laptops.
(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.
Quick update: Nirav is posting through it on Twitter
I’m getting a lot of questions already answered by my “before anyone asks I’m pro LGBTQ and pro immigrant” shirt.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 brb just putting myself through the gauntlet of arbitrary purity tests
From the stubstack: https://awful.systems/comment/9014362 https://awful.systems/post/5853532/9014330
Oh for fuck’s sake
This reply is worth quoting at length:
With all due respect, I think you profoundly misunderstand the nature of my concern here.
This is not a “I do not like this distribution” kind of argument.
This is a “the people you are sending my money to want me and my friends dead or deported” kind of argument.
The “big tent” argument works fine if everyone plays by some basic civil rules of understanding. Stuff like code of conducts, moderation, anti-racism, surely those things we agree on? A big tent won’t work if you let in people that want to exterminate the others.
I have no problem with Fedora, Bluefin, Bazzite, Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Linux Foundation, LVFS, Debian, KDE… What I have a problem is with Framework consistently, repeatedly encouraging and now sponsoring individuals that have shown to be absolutely destructive to the open source community.
Claiming that this “increasing the adoption of open source software” really misses the core part of the narrative here, which is that those people have been excluded from open source communities because they were so hateful, so destructive, that their mere presence was more harmful than beneficial.
DHH is a threat to the free software community as a whole at this point. The damage he ended up doing to the Ruby community might end up outweighing entirely his contributions to Rails, which is no small feat.
Vaxry (from hyprland) was banned from freedesktop.org, wrecking havoc in standardizing Wayland protocols that the whole community could have benefited from.
If you believe helping and sponsoring those people helps the open source community, we have quite divergent views on the best way forward and, perhaps, it is best if you concentrate on making hardware and leave the open source community alone.
In any case, thanks for your quick response, @nrp, and thanks for building those awesome products.
“[I]ncreasing the adoption of open source software” is such a bullshit argument here anyway, holy shit lol.
They’re not sponsoring Asahi Linux or FOSS Nvidia drivers but DHH’s fucking Arch setup and Ratpoison but worse and with rounded corners.
“We did not realize the ethics of the individuals that were behind these organizations; we’re sorry we should have investigated organizations better prior to donating to them. We will better research organizations in the future and we have stopped funding for these two groups”.
That. Is that so fucking difficult for them to say?
I’ve been checking the thread over the last couple days expecting something like that from them, but nope. Nothing yet.
At this point, I’m gonna stop extending benefit of the doubt - Framework’s choice to actively advance fascist interests, and double down when called out, is proof enough for me that they’re fascists themselves.
I don’t think it’s an “oopsie”. Their main channels are still on Twitter, and the CEO is now farming compassion from the Twitter fash.
“[I]ncreasing the adoption of open source software” is such a bullshit argument here anyway, holy shit lol.
Not to mention, actively welcoming Nazis into the open source bar is gonna achieve the exact goddamn opposite of increasing adoption, by driving away marginalised users, introducing unnecessary security risks, actively rotting communities from the inside, and God-only-knows-what-else.
Man fuck that. I dont expect a tech company to be great. But I have a 13” and was excited to see these keep getting better. But that response is just bullshit. There are legitimate business reasons aside from all of the many moral ones not to support bullshit reprehensible creators and by doing so publicly connect your company to them. If they can’t even see the dollar signs there… well… fuck em.
Maybe I’ll start quoting the Hyprland fucks in the framework forums and see if that language flies or gets taken down.
you can be proud of your 13"
To me they’re now just another tech company whereas before they had a little bit more credibility and respect.
The thread is going very well, someone decided reading was hard and that asking claude was easier
Highlights:
So I asked ChatGPT 5 Thinking, Claude Sonnet 4.5 with Extra Thinking, and Claude Opus 4.1 with Extra Thinking whether the article linked to multiple times provides any hard evidence of DHH being anything implied by the name-calling or by the outright name-calling seen in this thread.
Turns out the machines say there is no such evidence. It’s just an opinion piece.
Shoulda used Grok
oh, and someone quotes a blog from felipe contreras, an active xfash contributor, as a proof that there’s no problem with dhh at all.
how fucking convenient.
The absolute shitshow that’s been some of the most visible open source projects recently just reinforces my thoughts that one cannot establish trust (and therefore support) with any project leads unless they show their political affiliations upfront. The same way we demand to see a Foss license, we should expect to see what kind of person someone is before we use our community support to elevate them in any position of technical authority.
Yes this completely sucks. I assume most open source projects are run by leftists of some kind and hate finding out I’m wrong.
I have a framework 13 that I planned to use for years to come.
Really wish they would have at least corrected this shit when it was pointed out to them.
Guess I’m just going to run this thing until it breaks but they won’t be getting any more of my money.
Shoutout to gleam.run whose web page has always (AFAIK) said
Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.
They’re very based.
And if you click on the star (desktop only), the background becomes a pride flag :D
I’d love to use gleam but I don’t think it’s production-ready yet, so I’ll stick with elixir.
Nice, the language itself also looks pretty cool, which you love to see.
So they need my money to make their tent bigger, and inside that tent they let racists and toxic fuckers in?
Very fortunate that I have not given them a cent.
I was so close to ordering a framework 16 the other day, but got a strange feeling in my gut and backed off just before paying. maybe I’ll just settle for a used lenovo. it was food poisoning btw.
I feel like like I’ve seen the phrase “hyprland is the most toxic part of Wayland” more than once now and I’m not sure why it’s being phrased that way. Hyprland is not part of wayland, right?
you’ve seen it from me as “the most toxic part of the Wayland ecosystem, and that’s saying something”
I have been seeing this on multiple sites nowadays and I don’t get it: why do some ogs put their domain in a ref parameter for all outgoung links? like this is the hitching their wagon link: https://x.com/FrameworkPuter/status/1975388063070363974?ref=gardinerbryant.com
why does the blog need to share with twitter that I’m coming from this blog?
what’s more funny is that I believe this parameter is only useful to track some privacy hardened firefox users, as mosy browsers just send this info in a HTTP header…
