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Comment by k_bx | Hacker News Reader

How is project like Framework Laptop able to sponsor anyone? Are they profitable? Had an impression they're more of a startup stage project far from profitability.

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Me and a buddy have bought 3 Framework Desktops between us, they are just otherworldly awesome machines, and a good bit more expensive than the other Strix Halo models. I haven't been this excited about a computer since my i7 920 (Nehalem) in 2008, it's absolute alien technology.

I've also finally made the switch from a lifetime of Windows to Linux, and it just so happened to be CachyOS. The snappiness is just infinitely refreshing, to say nothing of not constantly submitting to Microsoft's dark patterns, so I'm super happy to see this news <3 Go Framework and AMD, go CachyOS and Linux!

Poll: Can Microsoft gargle my whole balls?

[A] Yes.

[B] Maybe later.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have the rest of the month to spend on vacation in my pyjamas coding ultra high precision N-body simulations and rendering them in 8K 60Hz entirely on CPU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz1Od_jkkFg) using my amazing new computer.

Obligatory question, how is the battery life, the sleep settings etc ?

It's a desktop mini PC, there's no battery. There are laptops with the same Ryzen AI 395+ CPU+RAM, but I'm doing heavy rendering / computing (actually I got it for rendering work, not AI stuff) and laptops are a bad form factor for that.

Sleep mode... works? I actually turned it off because I have long-running processes and it only uses 4W at idle with the screens off. It's 8W at idle with a 4K 160Hz monitor and a 1440p 144Hz monitor, which IMO is Alien Fucking Technology, considering there's a > 5GHz 16 core CPU with 128GB RAM (4 channels like Threadrippers, vs 2 for normal desktop CPUs) in there.

I'm pretty sure the Framework Desktop has zero minutes of battery life.

Obviously it has no battery, being a desktop. Regarding sleep, under Debian 13 it supports S0 (s2idle) only, which works without issue.

    $ cat /sys/power/state
    freeze mem

I just got the 128 GB model. It is very fast, and sips energy. Such a wonderful machine and naturally CachyOS works like a charm with it.

Framework is a not a huge organisation. This sponsorship consists of a few laptops and committing to a $250 monthly donation. There’s no contradiction here. CachyOS is also not a huge project.

Thanks, it makes at least some sense then. I'd expect them to sponsor Omarchy similarly then, in my twittersphere that made way more noise lately

Even if Framework were to dismiss or overlook the controversy surrounding Omarchys creator, which is ultimately their call, surely there are better ways to allocate OSS funding than sponsoring a multi-millionaire executives pet project. He can afford to bankroll it himself.

What is the controversy around dhh? That he's conservative leaning?

dhh always been "controversial", initially it was mostly about strongly held opinions about software, engineering and such, presented in a very vocal way that got a lot of attention at the time. Then at one point Basecamp had some drama about employees calling customers names, which spiraled into a debate about racism and company culture, and ultimately leading to Basecamp banning "discussions about society and politics" or similar. More recently he started sharing opinions about London having too many foreigners, immigrant communities having gangs of groomers or something, and a bunch of Ruby community members have written publicly about what they think about him.

The air around dhh always been dramatic for various reasons, not sure that particular theme is new. But I think is new is that currently people are re-evaluating if they want a prominent community leader to have views that could be seen as "against" members of the community they're supposedly leaders over.

Here's a good summary of some recent stuff: https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...

He's conservative in a European ethnonationalist way which is very common in Denmark (seemingly a majority position.) - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mgkd93r4yo

But it's anathema to the cosmopolitan multiculturalism we practice and appreciate in most of the anglosphere and parts of western Europe. Of which much of the tech world / HN posters are part of.

Nothing quite like being a minority in your own country and it's history in the next 25 years.

I'm in no place to pass judgement there.

I'm a European immigrant to Canada, in a suburb of Vancouver which is plurality Chinese with Europeans at about 30% and its totally cool and normal.

But I'm also typing this from vacation in Japan where they famously don't welcome immigration much. But people don't seem as upset by Asian nativism compared to European. And I don't have a diplomatic way of explaining the difference - it's the "bigotry of low expectations."

> in my twittersphere that made way more noise

I don't think that carries the weight it used to carry, if it even used to carry any weight. Measuring things by popularity tends to give poor results anyways, you want to sponsor and contribute to good things, regardless of their popularity.

Haha, Omarchy doesn't need sponsoring. To quote its creator, dhh[0], in response to the question "how do you plan on building revenue with your OS?":

I don't need revenue. I'm already rich.

0: https://x.com/dhh/status/1964773032339366006

They're not sponsoring Omarchy with a regular donation. They posted about it on Twitter and gave DHH a free Framework for testing

Astroturfed dotfiles share very little in common with actual distribution.

I think drumming up interest in getting users to run Linux on frameworks is a way for them to go back to vendors and try to get them to fix issues like power consumption that bugs the hell out of users (looking at you AMD)

Our total set of 2025 sponsorships and donations is around $225k, which is a fraction of a percent of our 2025 revenue. We would like to and plan to increase the funding we allocate to open source projects that our products and customers depend on in 2026. Our financials are healthy, and we see this as a good investment.

I think they are doing quite well, the CEO mentioned in a town hall video somewhere that they have strongest growth in the business segment where there are a lot of buyers who like the idea of a computer that their IT department can repair.

I also don't think these project sponsorships cost a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. I imagine they are basically part of the marketing budget.

When one of your main customer targets is Linux users, spending 5 figures on sponsoring a Linux project might be more effective than spending 5 figures on ad impressions.

Yeah, I recommended we buy Framework Laptops for the Linux users in my company and we are quite happy with it.

I imagine I'm not the only one doing that.

> Framework has not only provided us with a Framework Laptop 16 to help us optimize our kernel and packages on modern hardware, but they have also committed to a $250 monthly donation.

I'm gonna guess a laptop and a few thousand dollars (over years) isn't exactly breaking the bank.

https://frame.work/hu/en/blog/framework-sponsorships

They've raised about $45M in venture capital to date. I don't think they are profitable yet, but they at least have other people's money to throw around for now.

> They raised about $45M in venture capital

Impressive for a hardware upstart (which are usually relatively capital intensive), no?

> at least have other people's money to throw around for now.

Speaking of other people's money... Framework's been sponsoring many a project, some of which are controversial on their forums: https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...

It looks a little bit like a tempest in a teapot to me, but I'm impressed with their community guidelines. That thread got an exception to allow for more discussion, and it even permits "Critiques of Framework as a company" and "Calls for boycotts or product criticism".

https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...

I can see why they would do this. There's a vocal minority of completely unhinged Linux people. I've been running different Linux distros since 2002 and it has irritated me since then.

Nice, they will probably be able to buy like 128GB of ram in 2026.

Who cares if they're profitable? They want to push a right-wing agenda and no amount of silly things such as 'financial sense' will stop them.

When you have a techbro Vivek Ramaswamy as your head whose greatest desire is to be recognized as a honorary white by other techbros, nothing can ever stand in your way.

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