Framework Desktop
The absolute biggest news this week in relation to my research is that my new Framework Desktop arrived. I’ve known that I wanted this thing ever since it was announced in February 2025, as I have been the happy user of a Framework Laptop for a couple of years now. The old Dell laptop that I’ve been using as a substitute desktop neglected to turn on one morning, and so I greedily pulled the trigger and ordered one. This purchase took a serious chunk out of my savings: but life is short!
I’ve always wanted to be more savvy about the hardware aspect of computers since I got a bit of professional exposure to hardware and firmware as a backend engineer at Halter in 2021, but I remain embarrassingly dilettantish with respect to the knowledge domain. I know the basics that any software engineer worth their salt does—which is to say, I have a very abstract but functional understanding of how CPUs, RAM, GPUs, and hardware devices like disk and NVMe storage work, when it comes to writing performant software that runs on them—but there’s an enormity more to learn. Assembling a Framework is like the Ikea of assembling a computer: you do almost nothing because they’ve put all the ingredients in the right place for you and made it hard to screw up. But Apple and other hardware titans like Dell have made even the thought of fiddling with a RAM chip or replacing a fan all but unthinkable.
It took me less than an hour to set up my Framework Desktop, and now it’s sitting on my desk and running like the little monster that it is:
I run NixOS on all of my machines, and it’s effortless to run this operating system on a Framework machine, as all of the steps in the official NixOS install guide just work out of the box. Because this Framework Desktop is more powerful than my laptop, I also spent a few hours messing with ollama and configuring some local LLMs, which I intend to play with more seriously in the coming weeks. I follow Simon Willison’s work on llms, and I want to follow in his footsteps and play a bit more seriously with local models now that I have the beefy hardware to do so.