they are a great example of over engineering just to over engineer. lots of neat ideas that dont serve a purpose in the end. the only personal complaint i have is i dont like the trackpad. they tried to look like an apple trackpad but the button resistance wasnt considered. so its uncomforable to me with extended use. ive also had to replace two dead trackpads.

battery life is average. screen is flimsy but looks nice. lots of things are ok, not bad, just ok. without the hype of being repairable its just another macbook air clone you’d only buy after it goes on sale. if they’d allowed the design to be a little bulkier and used stronger parts instead of gimmicks, it could have been something worth its price.

i do like the aspect ratio and keyboard. the magnetic bezel is a great fidget. getting it without ram and ssd was nice. didnt have to toss the preinstalled ones when i put in 32gb and a 4tb ssd. but its not a ‘great’ laptop its just a laptop.

their lack of response to all this was emphasised by leaving all the racist and terfy comments up on the community forums for days. it was like browsing twitter.

they’re fine. im not throwing out my first get 13" but im also not upgrading it. i’ll use it till it dies and replace it like any other laptop*. it turned out to be a perfectly fine device. i knew going in i was spending extra for the chance it’d be my “last laptop” that’d be periodically upgraded. it’s definitely fallen short in daily use. decent enough computer that i dont regret having tried it. but i’d stopped suggesting framework to people long before we found out they’re a bunch of assholes.

meshcore is licensed the way you do it if you plan to go freemium down the road. its fine to use if your area has already gone that way. but meshtastic fits better in a foss standard and does the same thing.

either way you go its best to see these as fancy pagers not diy instant messagers. they have some great potential in a world where govs or nature can knock down cell service, if you’re purposeful and realistic about it. but they are not as easy to build as youtube would tell you. and they’re not gonna replace your phone full time.

i’d say start small. do the the webpage on some old hardware, maybe a wiki. content consumption things that would be uncomplicated for the group to adopt. avoid things that would mean managing accounts for other people early on. a wiki or some static page using something like modocs will be easy to run off a decent internet connection at the building. low bandwith usage and low traffic.

if your goal is to degoogle group, nextcloud could be helpful for the organisers. maybe if you have success on the simple sites you can get people on board with some hardware for a small nextcloud server. but dont plan on opening the next cloud up to the kids. thats a world of risk you don’t need to open up.

if you’ve already got something at home to run it on and want it easy to set up/maintain. take a look at mkdocs.

honestly every explanation probably just ends at ‘this is what i learned on and it works’. same way i religiously use nano and try to do everything in bash first. or how a couple coworkers can’t stop explaining their vim workflow and defending python unprompted like it’s a trauma response for them. my current homelab is also running a r9 with 64gb ram and 30tb storage. if i were paying for remote hosting, still using salvaged hardware or being paid, i’d invest time learning newer processes. but containers haven’t caught my interested and this set up takes basically no effort on my part to maintain, so i can focus my limited free time elsewhere.