Are the pre-built laptop also compatible with linux?

Do you know if pre-built laptops that come with windows are also compatible with linux if I install it myself? I haven’t picked which one I want yet but just want to know if any pre-built laptop config would not work with linux. Thanks

Yes of course they are

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Yes, they consist of the same components. Do pay attention to the disk layout, though:

Because Windows is pre-installed, there is already an EFI partition on the disk, with windows stuff in it. Even if you remove the windows partition, that will still be there. It takes up space on the EFI partition, which is rather small. I had a BIOS update fail because there was not enough space on the EFI partition to unpack the updater and I did not get a meaningful error message about that. Once I saw other comments that space on the EFI partition is required for updates, I checked, found, and deleted the windows stuff (hoping that it was just that), after which I had enough room for updating.

I don’t think automated linux installers/formatters will take care of this unless you find a “nuke the whole disk and put a fresh layout on it”.

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Yes! But you also get a Windows license, pre-builts are perfect if you plan to dual boot.

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How did you get rid of it?

You can use something like the Gparted live iso to completely wipe the disk.

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Most installers allow you to use the whole disk which would remove windows too.

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I thought I could just make a new EFI partition and mark that as the active one, so I made a 1G EFI partition on the disk as well as a 1G /boot partition. Turns out it never used the newly made partition, since there doesn’t seem to be a way to designate which partition should be used to EFI boot. Hence, grub’s EFI stub got stuffed into the originally existing 100M EFI partition, next to the windows EFI boot stuff. That fit, but didn’t leave enough space for a BIOS update (I think it was 3.17 that ran into troubles, both via LVFS and via the EFI shell).

To make more room, I ended up just deleting the files from the EFI partition that looked like they were windows holdovers (windows never ran on my laptop and its partition was already nuked). That ended up being sufficient and luckily I was able to guess which files were likely grub/fedora.

I originally was apprehensive of deleting the EFI system partition because I didn’t know if there was any recovery software stuffed in there, so while I knew I wanted to erase windows, I was a little more conservative with the first partition.

I therefore think that Framework might do well to make that partition a little bigger. 1G is still very small on modern disks and would give a lot more room on EFI for updates etc (remember the recent Microsoft KB5034441 update that was a disaster due to many computers having too small a boot partition to accommodate the update). These are partitions that tend to last through various upgrade cycles, so future-proofing them with a little additional room would make sense.

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The EFI partition size is decided by the Microsoft installer when Windows is installed. Microsoft has shot themselves in the foot with this because they have taken the Apple approach of we’ll just do it one way and hope it lasts. UEFI has been around for decades and it has been well known that the EFI partition is the scratch space for major updates/changes to a system. :person_facepalming:

Alternatively, you can either manually resize your partitions (difficult), or there are a number of utilities (some of them free) that you can put on a USB and move/resize your partitions. (Partition Magic is one from a long time ago I have used) :bulb:

Framework is on the hardware side of things but partition layouts are driven by the operating system installer.

Welcome to the Community @Patrick_Aljord!

Going back to the original posters question; yes you can install many flavors of Linux on your Framework computer.

To ensure similar support you would be best to use the two supported varieties of Ubuntu and Fedora. You can always switch to a different variety later. Either of those options has the support and testing from Framework itself. Checkout the help section of the Framework support site for guides on installing Linux on your machine.