Wil.to

Soon We Can Finally Banish JavaScript to the ShadowRealm

2026-05-12T00:00:00Z

“What is a thread? A miserable little pile of execution contexts! But enough talk: have at you!”

Google’s Prompt API

2026-05-06T00:00:00Z

No web standard should require you to agree to an advertising company’s “terms of use.”

Google’s intent to ship for their Prompt API was met with explicit opposition from Mozilla and WebKit and deep concern from the W3C TAG. Obviously a non-starter, as presented; a real “back to the drawing board” moment. That’s web standards.

It has, of course, already shipped — pushed through on the basis of “developer interest.” Google’s own citations for said interest include this thread with three comments (one unrelated) and a 2:1 ratio of dislikes:likes, and the completely citation-free “survey results” in a presentation by Chrome’s Web AI Product Manager, which says that “overall satisfaction” for “prompt for extensions” is “8.0.” That’s right: one or more person or persons may or may not have spoken, and in a voice funneled through a person whose professional success explicitly hinges on demand for this feature, they cried out: “eight.” That’s web standards, baby! Ship it!

Now, I’m not going to comment on the ostensible use cases behind Google’s Prompt API proposal, because my thoughts on the subject of generative AI won’t be news to anyone familiar with my work. It isn’t for me. If you are someone that would conceivably make use of a standardized API for interacting with large language models, I will point out that this isn’t that, as shipped — this is currently an API for interacting with Google’s Gemini Nano model, which could serve as the prototype for that API, someday. At present, this is a web standard designed around a single company’s product. That means that use of this API, as implemented in Chrome right now, requires you to agree with Google’s “prohibited use policy” for the only model available to it.

So, as it stands now, imagine that the Geolocation API had to license mapping information from Google, and that using that API required that you — the developer — agreed to the Google Maps Prohibited Use Policy by typing a line of JavaScript that accesses it. Imagine needing to be certain that the website you’re working on for a client has strict rules around “content created for the purpose of […] sexual gratification” or “impersonating an individual” before typing that img, lest you run afoul of the HTML Embedded Media™ Terms and Conditions. This is incredibly “not how web standards works,” but here we are. Already shipped.

As a Chrome user, you’ll have received Gemini Nano in the form of a 4GB transfer recently; no permission asked or required. If you remove it, Chrome will re-download it. For reasons I can only guess at, Gemini Nano is presumably now considered to be part of Chrome itself, despite being a standalone product that is included alongside but not integrated into the browser — the way a copy of Bonzi Buddy included in a browser update might be considered a part of said browser. My understanding is that you’ll have to explicitly agree to download alternate models in the future, per the specification. Just to put the finest possible point on that: Google’s model is the exception to the specification Google wrote. You have Gemini Nano, full stop, the ~~browser built into Windows 98~~ model built into Chrome. You’ll need to give your blessing to install other models. It also seems noteworthy that the “AI” services offered by Chrome right now — typing help, suggestions, page summaries — show no signs of eventually making use of local models, and continue to make requests to Google-owned servers. There is, one assumes, considerable benefit to keeping that line blurry.

A lot has already been written on the privacy risks and very real costs associated with the mandatory model transfer alone, but I will comment on the one privacy concern Google has been willing to formally acknowledge, albeit in a handwavy way: installed models provide a fingerprinting vector like any other browser feature or aspect of your browsing environment, but potentially a much more fraught one. There is a stark difference in the privacy picture drawn by “a user with a 2560x1600 display and a browser with access to the Geolocation API” and “a user with a 2560x1600 display and a browser with access to the LLM model available only to logged-in Facebook users that was released on May 6th.”

Once a model is available on your device, per the specification, any website you visit will be able to send prompts to that model without requesting permission to do so, then do whatever it wants with the responses. And again, Gemini Nano is on your device if you’re using Chrome, and it will be again if you remove it, unless you start tearing out wires in ways that the average user of the web can’t. So, in short: you now have an LLM running on your machine, and any website you visit can make use of it, and whatever processing resources it requires. Google — a company that has paid billions of dollars in settlements for lawsuits related to privacy violations and deceptive practices in data collection — has said not to worry about it.

I’ve logged a lot of hours angry at web standards — at the processes, at the results, at people joining conversations for the very first time with the phrase “we just need.” Consensus is frustrating work, and “in a good compromise no one leaves happy,” and et cetera, sure, fine, that’s the process. I’m angry now, absolutely — but never have I felt this kind of second-hand embarrassment around a web standard before now. This is, hands-down, the most insultingly transparent attempt at web standards bullying I’ve ever seen, including past ones from Google, which is — and I cannot stress this point enough — a company that sells advertisements. This is miles more eyeroll-worthy than AMP, where you’ll recall that a legion of tight-smiling dorks wearing Alphabet lanyards tried to assure us that the only means of survival for the web itself was to funnel all of it through Google’s servers, and only use their very good advertisements instead of those bad other ones. This is leagues more cringe than Manifest V3, where the only responsible move for the health of the web and the only way to save us all and ensure our privacy was to lock down browser extensions in just such a way as to allow Google to send us their very good advertisements.

I’d like to end this with something actionable — I wish I could. Google has made it clear, in the most formal language web standards has to offer, that they’re doing this. I’d like to say something to the tune of “their whole argument hinges on ‘positive developer sentiment,’ so let’s show them that there isn’t any” — but there already isn’t any. They cited places where there isn’t any. That’s not how it works for them. Google participates in the web standards process the way a bear participates in the “camping” process.

So I guess the takeaway is: remember this one too, I guess? Throw this on the pile alongside all the hours you spent forced to make an “AMP version” of a website, and alongside every privacy-obliterating tracking script Manifest V3 has forced you to transfer so far. Remember this the next time Google announces an “exciting new standard” that they’re heroically championing — for you, for users, for good of the web — in language that has just a hint of inevitability about it. You know who they are. You’ve known for a long time.

The End of Responsive Images

2026-04-24T00:00:00Z

A long overdue villain reveal and a path toward finally — finally — being rid of long-winded sizes attributes.

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Living in Interesting Times

2025-12-23T00:00:00Z

Most importantly, 2025 was the year I got really, really good at Mega Man.

I don’t know where I got it from, but at some point the question “do you prefer for things to be good or interesting” came to sit alongside “you gotta make your own fun” and “being ‘in trouble’ is a fake idea” on a very short list of phrases that resonate so precisely at my frequency that they’ve turned into principles. The other two are quotes from Bobcat Goldthwait on an episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast and an Achewood panel, respectively, just in case you think I’m putting on any fancy philosophical airs here.

Now, hear me out: I do like things that are good. That’s right, I’m brave enough to say it. Shout-out to all my fellow fans of things that are good; I see you out there. “Good” is frequently preferable to “interesting!” In fact, there are a great many things I would prefer to be less interesting. “The times,” for example; living in less interesting times would be a nice change of pace. No, there’s a reason it’s a question and not the statement “interesting things are better than good things.” “Good” has a lot of meanings. On the low end of the scale are “adequate,” “acceptable,” “fine.” Where “good” means “just okay,” I’m gonna choose “interesting” ten times out of ten, even if that ends up being a little more… fraught, let’s say.

So, with that squarely in mind: what an interesting year.

Collecting a steady paycheck from somewhere would be inarguably good, but being independent remains interesting. This was not the least stressful year to be independent, as you either already know or could pretty easily guess. I managed to keep myself mostly booked with client work for the first half of the year — the hours are a little less and the rates are a little lower than previous years, but I’m getting by, knock-on-wood. I’m not saying I don’t lose any sleep over it, but still, getting by, and that’s all I’m ever after. I turn down more work than I probably should, on paper, but I’ve drawn some hard and fast lines around the kind of work I will not do. I won’t lend my name to any organization or project with the kind of goals that I wouldn’t want my name on; I won’t use “generative AI” and I won’t help propagate it, full stop. I’m unbelievably fortunate and immensely privileged to be able to draw those lines in the first place.

All my time for the latter half of the year was booked up by JavaScript for Everyone, which was — I don’t mind saying — a little tense at times. Writing off several months’ worth of could’ve-been-billable hours during a slower year in order to work on something that might end up paying the bills was not the least stressful call I’ve ever made. Writing the course itself, making goofy promo videos, firing off newsletters — seeing what resonates with people and what doesn’t, constantly reloading the special webpage that determines whether the whole experiment was a success or failure and to what degree and how many months of my very real greater-Boston mortgage it would cover — all that sure as hell qualifies as interesting, but there was no way of knowing how it was going to shake out until after the cost had been well and truly sunk. All the not knowing made for a stressful couple of months and a very stressful couple of weeks, but ultimately: it went over pretty good! Not, like, retirement-good, but pretty damn good. It added up to less than spending that time hustling for client work might have — and I mean, who can say whether all those hours would’ve been booked up anyway — but it was enough, and again: that’s all I ever want — I just want to be able to get by, while doing the kind of work I want to do. The course itself — and I say this without ego nor intended sales pitch — is really solid, thanks in no small part to Mike Pennisi’s tech editing and all the support I got from the team at Piccalil.li. It looks great, it works great, the process of bringing it all together went as smoothly as Notion would allow, and I’m genuinely proud of the end result. I really do think people are going to get a lot out of it. I hope so, anyway.

It was also, in no uncertain terms, exhausting. We’re a couple months out from launch and I’m still pretty burnt-out, if I’m being honest — I’m a little surprised I’m even writing this. But, y’know, that’s sort of table stakes for a big writing project; not really a big mark in the “minus” column.

To tell you the truth: as with a great many other things, the big downside was being perceived. Lots of promotion, lots of posting, lots of linking; I do not love attention, which is why I generally tend to be pretty quiet out here on the information superhighway. In fact, I’m kinda dragging myself kicking-and-screaming through the post you’re reading right now. The writing doesn’t come as naturally without a focus beyond “look now upon me, and my whole deal, and my cool ideas” — woof does that ever trip me up. I don’t want to be Seen and Known, I mostly just want to do push-ups in the basement and quietly tend to my bees. Great year for the bees, speaking of, quick aside — really strong hive this year.

So then, why all that; why this post? Well, I really liked doing this work and I want to do more of it. I’m not sure I made this explicit anywhere, but I really did write the whole thing out of spite. There’s a real effort underway to devalue our industry — replace all us uppity designers and developers with chatbots that generate microwave-reheated websites and never say “no” to requests for carousels and tracking scripts. The more autocomplete code these tools churn out, the worse the web gets. The more uptake these tools see, the less room there is for junior developers to exist at all; the less junior developers there are, the less senior developers there ever will be. Our industry gets worse, those of us left in it get paid worse, the web gets worse, everything gets worse. I want us to get good out of spite; I want us to beat back the machine. Maybe teaching people can help with that.

Plus, y’know, I did enjoy the process of making it, stressful as things were. This is the most in-my-own-voice big thing I’ve ever written, and that felt good. I liked doing the behind-the-scenes newsletters way more than I thought I was going to — enough that I’m considering having a newsletter, though the lack of a central focus for it makes me a little hesitant. It’s tough to get in gear without an externally-accounted schedule and a focused topic to square the writing against, even if I did immediately deviate from said focus almost every time.

But hey, speaking of newsletters and being extremely perceived: I started doing a little streaming this year, which was also more fun than I expected it to be. ~~20XX~~ 2025 was the year of the Megamanathon, an eight-hour stream wherein we thwarted Doctor Wily’s schemes across seven consecutive games and raised four thousand dollars for Trans Lifeline; that was a hell of a thing. Since I had worked out all the logistics for streaming that, I figured I might as well give it a shot while I was getting the course together — specifically, while writing the newsletters — and it was surprisingly helpful. Kept me focused(-ish) on the task at hand and kept me limber enough to not get bogged down in editing a single sentence to death for half an hour. They were pretty sparsely attended, but I’m not looking for any liking-and-subscribing and I don’t want to grow any “follower counts” pretty much anywhere, just like, fundamentally. I’m still kinda looking for reasons to do it more, just for-funsies, but I’m not sure anyone out there needs to watch me run Flash Man’s level over and over again for millisecond-level perfection. Right? Maybe? Right?

Long year, but not a boring one; I’m still hanging onto “interesting” and only occasionally with white knuckles. If I want things to stay that way, well, I might need to get square with being a little more visible. I’ve said as much elsewhere, but because of you I’m still here, still independent, still able to do the kind of work I want to be doing for clients, for the web, and for you — and privileged enough to be able to turn down work the kinds of work that I don’t believe in. I owe that to all of you. So, thank you. Sincerely.

Oh, and the answer is Silksong, since I know you’re wondering. Hollow Knight: Silksong, game of the year.

The Cloffice

2025-06-20T00:00:00Z

If you've seen me popping up on the internet somewhere recently—streaming or on a podcast or what-have-you—you may have wondered why it looks like I'm crammed in a closet someplace. The answer is that I'm crammed in a closet someplace.

As briefly alluded to elsewhere, I’ve spent my whole career working like the subject of a stock photo: no external keyboard, mouse, monitor, anything—just me with a laptop perched on some non-work-dedicated surface, smiling into the middle distance and holding a forkful of salad.

Part of the reason I never really prioritized an office is that I possess one of history’s worst spinal columns; a real all-timer. When I walk I sound like a guitar case full of broken plates. That means that I work standing, because sitting begets hunching, and hunching begets Ibuprofin. So, years ago, I got myself a little adjustable laptop stand, set it on a non-work-context table, and that was that; no sense having a bunch of dedicated space for a desk I can’t sit at and a chair I can’t sit in. As you might expect, this meant that said table looked increasingly like the throne from the latter half of Akira (1988), overtaken by cords and cables and thumb drives and one (1) anguished little weird guy.

The other part of the reason is that I live in a house (don’t jinx it) ten minutes outside of Boston (don’t jinx it). What—I’m just gonna have an entire room? To type in? What am I, Ben Affleck? There are only like twenty or thirty rooms in greater-Boston total. I don’t just have an entire room laying around.

No, I’ll tell you what I did have, though: a hammer, a considerable supply of ibuprofin (see above), the barest semblance of a plan, and that one closet. You know the one closet; you probably have it too. Maybe you’ve got an old window unit air conditioner in there, a cardboard tube containing a poster you’ll never hang up, an air mattress that hasn’t been used in years. Two clothes hangers, as empty as they are mismatched. Some bubble wrap “in case you need to mail something someday.” We had one such closet, and that sucker was like three whole feet by four entire feet—man, that’s a Camberville one-bedroom. That’s an office.

Get in the robot, Wilto.

So I tore apart that one closet, ran new wiring for outlets and an overhead light, snaked some network cables, put down a floor with leftovers we had kicking around from redoing the living room years ago, re-tiled the ceiling for no practical reason, and—most importantly—devised and 3D-printed a wall mount contraption to hold my laptop, two additional monitors, and all the accoutrements required to make the whole thing go.

I mainly call it the “cloffice,” sometimes “the Gundam” when I suspect that piloting it may cause me to have some kind of nervous breakdown, and “the Eva” at such times as I outright refuse to get in it.

The Cloffice

The whole thing very literally hinges on two feet of 35mm pole, upon which are a pair of monitor arms and a swing-arm tray thing for my laptop.

Everything I know about personal branding I learned from Dr. Wily ("put a W and/or a skull on it").

The pipe is bolted to the wall with a set of mounts I 3D printed. In fact, it’s 3D-printed contraptions all the way down from there: all the fittings for attaching the ring light, microphone boom, and webcam; the game controller sits in a little 3D printed holder that’s bolted to underside of the tray, likewise the hook for the headphones. We’re not gonna talk about how the whole thing snapped off the wall week one because I forgot to crank up the infill percentage on the first prototype wall mounts—that’s not gonna come up in this post, or indeed ever again now that they’ve been redesigned, reinforced, and printed with heavier-duty PLA. I stood on one of 'em.

I wanted a couple of spare keys for various shortcuts and have a soldering iron, so I built that too.

The walls are covered in sound-proofed panels—there’s no avoiding looking like some kind of dorkass Dracula standing in a coffin, but at least it doesn’t have to sound that way. The one soundproofing exception is four feet of slatwall paneling—kind of like pegboard—for storage and modular shelving. I fully expected I’d be, like, putting my coffee on the floor or balancing it on my head while I type, but the waist-high slatwall shelving gives me plenty of ~desk space without so much that I start piling books and nailguns and stuff on it, as one does when given any sufficiently large surface. I mostly keep the shelves tucked under the display, but they slide out to wherever I want them. Also tucked back in the corner are a little printed Framework “expansion card” holder and USB/MicroSD card holder fitted with slatwall hooks.

Please ignore the mismatched cheapass stick-on shoe moulding. Even in my infinite capacity for writing-procrastination, that's a tough one to get on the to-do list.

The monitors have unexpectedly functional USB hubs built into them, which I use for anything stationary or in need of charging—microphone, light, webcam, headphones, etc.—which means that while this behemoth wasn’t really made for walkin’ in the first place, I can still pack it up and go with minimal fuss. I mean, I don’t; I have a raggedy old Surface Pro 3 that I Linux’d up for on-the-go, which has the unintended benefit of being too old and busted for me to do pretty much anything but type in a Markdown file, providing me with a truly organic distraction-free writing experience.

All told: pretty good! I went into this with my sights set squarely on “acceptable, but weird,” and landed on “good, parentheses, weird.” What more could one want?

The year couple months of Linux on the desktop.

2024-10-11T00:00:00Z

After spending my entire career on various MacsBook Pro, I’m now using a Framework 16 with Ubuntu.

Okay, “man has, uses computer” doesn’t make for the most thrilling headline of all time; I get that.

However, I also get the sense that I’m not the first and only dork to start entertaining the notion of not splashing out thousands of dollars on a machine that feels increasingly disposable, just to use a platform that feels increasingly overbearing. So if you should ever find yourself in the same position I was about six months ago, with a tube of CA glue in one hand and tweezers semi-permanently affixed to the other, attempting to carefully glue a command key’s butterfly hinge back onto a machine with about an hour of battery life and a slowly expanding crack in the screen—really living the black-and-white, “there’s got to be a better way” part of the infomercial—maybe there’s something of value in here for you.

My whole deal

First, I want to establish a few things that made this viable in the first place—if none of this resonates, listen, I’m not trying to sell anything here. A new MBP would have served me just fine, as the last one did, and the one before that did. They work; that’s, like, their main thing.

My main thing, arguably, is fixing stuff. My secondary thing, almost inarguably, is hubris. Regardless of the “it” or the nature of the “broken,” I am possessed of an unshakable, soul-deep confidence that I can fix it—that if someone was able to put it together, I am able to take it apart, and if it is made up of component parts, I am able to replace or repair those parts. You will not convince me otherwise. That I have tried and failed to fix many things in the past will not convince me otherwise. That there are things I don’t especially want to fix will not convince me otherwise. The understanding that there are, in fact, a great many things that I am unable to fix will not convince me otherwise. I can fix anything. I did not choose to be this way; it is in my blood.

As you might imagine, I bristle pretty hard at popping a hood to find a plastic shield bolted down with special dealership-owned security bits, as it is clearly intended as an insult to me personally. When I encounter something that wasn’t meant to be fixed, that I am not allowed to fix, my incredible hubris is obviously unchanged, but the way I see that object is. It is disposable. Just because I lived and died by the MacBook Pro, professionally speaking, didn’t mean I harbored any respect for it—it doesn’t get a name beyond “MacBook Pro (4).”

Of course, none of this means that I want to spend my one wild and precious life constantly changing spark plugs—likewise, I didn’t want to pick up a part-time job in IT just to support my current full-time job making websites. If I was ditching Apple-made hardware, my options were either Windows or Linux. I hadn’t used the former in earnest since the 1900s and understood it to also be increasingly what-if-your-computer-was-an-iPad-level unserious, so I really only had the latter as an option, giving me visions of driver conflicts, “compiling” things, and needing to know what a “kernel” is (I know what a kernel is; shh).

So in order to avoid burning my website-making time cursing in the direction of files with .conf extensions, I decided to give myself a probationary period. I bought a crummy old refurbished Dell to chuck Ubuntu on there and test-drive it as my work machine for a month. The first time I found myself stuck fussing with my Sound Blaster 16 instead of making websites, the ripcord gets pulled; buy-it-now another wildly expensive slab of milled aluminum, plug it in, turn it on, back to work. That would, I cannot stress enough, have been fine! Not better, but fine.

The Software

I already spent a lot of quality time with the command line, so no big change there. I’ve also put together all manner of one-off Raspberry Pi contraptions—for example, the Super Wiltondo Entertainment System, he bragged—so I can sudo with the okay-est of them. I mostly went with Ubuntu because that was the name that kept showing up on the Framework website, and I wasn’t gonna go trying to form opinions about things I hadn’t tried out for myself (presumably there is some other distribution that I would like better, but this thing is doing what I need it to; shh).

I had two primary concerns, software-wise: Sketch and VoiceOver. If I’m doing capital-D Design, I’m doing it in the browser anyway—“work with the medium” and all—but I still used Sketch for things like the zine and I wasn’t enthusiastic about learning a new design tool from scratch. Losing quick-and-easy access to VoiceOver was the big one. I already do most of my in-depth testing on a raggedy old PC set up for NVDA and JAWS anyway—likewise, I figured I could hot glue my old MBP back together enough for VO use, or pick up a refurbished Mac Mini or something. Still, not ideal to do all my typing on one machine and all my testing elsewhere.

With the count at one strike and some disdain in my heart, I fired up this bargain-basement Dell and installed Ubuntu.

The good

Well, first off, it worked: on both my prototype Dell and the Framework, Ubuntu installed without a hitch. I had to adjust some resolution and scaling stuff on the Framework right away, but more on that later.

There are some little OS features that I really appreciate, but given the amount of time I spend in the browser, I don’t notice a ton of day-to-day difference unless I go looking. Surprising absolutely nobody, myself included, the UI feels like a thin veneer over the real action happening at the command line level; that’s how I was using MacOS anyway, but that veneer was constantly growing thicker through more and more layers of “are you sure you want to install something from the icky internet when our app store is but a click away?” I like apt just fine. I’d always rather catch a bit of boom mic in the shot than watch something filmed in front of a green screen.

I had already switched to WezTerm back when iTerm2 started smearing “AI” all over itself, so I grabbed that, set it up the way I had it on my Mac, pulled over my dotfiles, and I was up and running. WezTerm probably wasn’t necessary (shh), but it was nice to have something familiar to brace myself against. I installed Timeshift so I could roll the whole system back when I started breaking things.

Lunacy has turned out to be a pretty decent replacement for Sketch (also besmeared with “AI,” but I figure that’s just how it’s gonna go until that particular bubble bursts). I started using Scribus for zine layouts—a little arcane, but workable.

I tinkered with some virtual machine stuff so I could spin up a Windows VM for quick NVDA/JAWS testing, and eventually landed on Quickemu—which presented me with a big button that installs a MacOS VM, which I had no idea was doable. The Mac VM hasn’t turned out to be the least flaky thing I’ve ever used, but it works enough to get into Safari and switch on VoiceOver for a quick spot-check. The Windows VM is solid.

The bad

I do miss having VoiceOver a keyboard shortcut away, but what can you do; not like it was my primary testing environment anyway.

My antique Bluetooth earbuds (“Jabra Elite t65,” in case you’re landing here from some search engine) straight-up didn’t work—something about the built-in microphone and audio profiles baked into the things meant that it initially paired as the “high-fidelity playback (A2DP)” profile, but when reconnecting it always registered as a low-quality headset (HSP/HFP, whatever that means), without the option to switch back to the high-quality. While “audio issues” are my Linux-nightmare cliché of choice, I figured, grain of salt; these things were from like 2014. I got new headphones. They work fine.

I hadn’t considered that I’d be losing the Messages app, which is inconvenient for sure, but not like my phone is across the street during the work day anyway. I tried setting up BlueBubbles since I left my old MBP networked to grab files as-needed, but it was too unreliable to be of any real use. Ah well.

After I’d put the Dell through its paces and determined that I was in decent shape for day-to-day use, I committed to the Framework.

Out of the box, so to speak, the scale was way, way off—everything was almost unreadably small. Changing the overall scaling in the settings threw everything off; pointer location, size of windows, etc. In order to make it usable, the trick was to scale all the UI text in the accessibility settings. Not intuitive, but it did work: everything reliably shows up at the size I’d expect. It does mean—at least, I think this is why—that two-finger scrolling moves really fast. I assume I could fix it somehow, but I’m used to it at this point.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention here that font scaling overall is a little iffy compared to a Mac, perhaps unsurprisingly; not showstopping, but when you choose fonts for a living you notice such things. I also feel like I’ve seen a few more subpixel rounding weirdnesses in Firefox, but maybe that’s me.

I used to manually type things like curly quotes and accented characters on my Mac, like an absolute lunatic—obviously all of that is right out. Ubuntu uses a compose key, which I’m still getting used to.

Now, here’s the big one: I asked for no more guardrails, and I got no more guardrails. MacOS is bumper bowling all the way down: even after I click through four layers of warnings and “are you sure”-toggles to install something of dubious origin, it’s a pretty safe bet nothing will break-break. Here, I wanted to set up the cheap little “Neflaca” printer I grabbed for the zine shipping labels, which I hadn’t bothered to do on the test machine. Their website offered a script to install drivers for Linux. I grabbed it while half paying attention, ran it, and was asked to restart. Some of you are flinching, but more of you probably aren’t any more than I was; like, what, worst case, a printer doesn’t work? A printer not working is quite possibly the least surprising situation in all of computer science.

My scaling broke. I could see the whole thing, but I couldn’t move my cursor outside of a little rectangle at the top left; what my window manager thought was the actual screen, I guess? This was, as Linux dorks would absolutely guess and non-Linux dorks could not possibly guess, related to “Wayland.” I don’t one hundred percent know what Wayland is (shh), and I won’t claim to—I know it was a change to the default windowing system as of a few years ago. I know applications not built for Wayland show up grainy and blurry. I know it is Complicated. My hunch is that an old, poorly made non-Wayland thing got in there and tried to de-Wayland the whole place, resulting in disaster.

I rolled the system back to the day before with Timeshift and everything worked fine again. I plugged the printer into my half-busted MBP, shared it across the network, and print that way. Lesson learned.

The Hardware

I went with a relatively spartan “DIY” Framework 16. No graphics card module needed for my day-to-day purposes, and no light-up spacers or programmable LED panels—that stuff is clever and all, but this thing is for work. Picked up some memory from a third-party to save a couple bucks, which was already a nice little difference here in the zeroth step of the switching process.

In terms of ergonomic preferences, I went into this playing on the highest possible difficulty level: owing to years of MBTA commutes and working out of Diesel Cafe for an occasional change of scenery, I’ve always used my computers straight-up-no-chaser: built-in trackpad and keyboard, no external monitor. There is certainly a case to be made for switching to a more stationary setup these days, but still, I wanted to feel comfortable using whatever machine I ended up with in the same way.

The good

I put it together and it worked, for one thing. It arrived as individually-boxed parts, mostly assembled: the chassis with motherboard and screen already attached, the keyboard I chose, a trackpad, a number pad, and the spacers that fill out the empty space around the trackpad. I wouldn’t say I built it any more than I’d proudly claim to have “built” something from IKEA, but I wasn’t looking for a hobby project; I have websites to build. I’ll tell you what I did take away from the assembly process, though: I’m not sure I’ve ever been presented with any appliance more designed around being fixed. Not just at a “no glue or security bits”-level, but everything clearly labelled right down to the individual un-drop-and-lose-able captive screws; components with tiny QR code stickers that take you to those parts’ replacement guides.

The keyboard and trackpad snap into place with magnetic connectors and lock in with a pair of latches, with spacers filling out the empty spots to the side(s) of the trackpad and the keyboard if you’re not using it alongside a number pad. If you’ve been doing any reading up on these machines prior to this, you might be expecting me to say something about cosmetic tolerances here, like the spacers having enough wiggle room to constantly be a little out of alignment or slightly bowed. To you I would offer: I rode a British bike built in 1978 and live in a house built in the 1800s—I could not possibly begin to care about cosmetic things being slightly misaligned. It don’t hurt the running of it any; both the trackpad and keyboard felt good once I got past the tremendous psychic damage of rebuilding twenty years’ worth of muscle memory.

The ports are configurable by way of “expansion cards” that fit into six slots along the sides of the machine, connecting up to recessed USB-C ports—they look a little like GameBoy cartridges. I have mine set up with a micro SD card reader, three USB-C passthrough cards, and a couple of old USB-A cards—if I need an ethernet or HDMI port, I flip a little latch on the back, pull one of the expansion cards out, and snap in the card for the new port. It’s a smart system.

The screen’s aspect ratio gives me a little more vertical space, and I’m not mad about it. On paper I think this thing is faster, but honestly, I’ll never have the throttle open far enough to know.

All told, the biggest “good” I can cite is that I don’t find myself missing anything about my MBP’s hardware. That’s a high bar to clear.

The bad

From what I’ve seen around the internet, “I put it together and it worked” isn’t necessarily the slam-dunk given one might hope for. If internet commenters are to be believed, the quality assurance process around Framework hardware isn’t quite what it ought to be, and the support is worse. I have no idea how much stock to put in that, though: this one hypertext node aside, not a lot of people are falling all over themselves to punch “IT WORKS FINE AND I HAVE NO STRONG FEELINGS ABOUT IT” into a textarea.

The screen is a little less sharp, in a way where I can really only tell if I go looking for it. The battery life is just okay; I want to say four or so hours by default, with regular-old-web-development-level usage. My guess is that this can be tinkered with at the OS level—I’ve read that identical machines running Windows do a lot better—but coming from the incredibly busted ~one hour battery on my MBP I feel spoiled anyway. For some reason, the webcam makes everything show up over-saturated and very orange on Zoom, but it still happened after replacing the built-in webcam with a better one (mostly because I wanted an excuse to upgrade something). I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a software thing; Zoom for Linux is pretty clearly neglected. I downloaded cameractrls and fixed it.

Here’s a weird one: there’s a just barely audible crackle from the speakers when I charge this thing with a USB-C cable that isn’t throttled to 60 or 100 watts (including the one that came with the machine) regardless of the current the laptop is actually drawing. I tell you, I have no idea what that’s about. I got a 100 watt cable, and problem solved. I never draw more than ~80 anyway.

So all told: a little more fussing required to get things dialed in the way I wanted them compared to firing up a new MacBook, but not a ton.

Where I’m at

I like it.

If it breaks, I can fix it. If that thing is hardware, I pull out the busted part and put in a new one. If that thing is software, I roll it back to before it broke, and I’m up and running again (I even tore off all the parts of the test Dell that weren’t necessary to boot, chucked in a bigger hard drive, and set it up as a network storage that I rsync my Timeshift directory to daily). If eventually this thing can’t do something that I need it to do, I can upgrade it. Hell, if I wanted to build parts for it, I could.

Most of all, this setup fulfilled my zeroth requirement: do not get in my way while I am working. A little extra fussing on day one-ish, sure, fine, but I haven’t yet found myself unable to join a meeting on time for inexplicable computer-reasons or woken up to a busted development environment because NodeJS stopped NodeJS-ing correctly (any more than it usually does). It has a little more day-to-day grit to it than yet another MacBook Pro, but it still hasn’t tripped my incredibly low threshold for computer-related frustration.

I won’t say the word “recommend,” because again, I’m not here to sell anything. This is working for me, and if you’re starting to feel like a tool you use for work is becoming frustratingly iPaddified and artificially intelligenced, it might be an option.

Wil.to

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