just got my 12. tried omarchy and ubuntu 25.10. ubuntu is better than omarchy (don tthink omarchy really has anything for tablets in mind… but the touch screen and everything else is really fast so it feels solid). ubuntu isn’t too bad and touch targets work, but i can’t login because software keyboard wont show. i plan on distro hopping a bit. but anyone that can save me time? what distro and DE should i go for?
Fedora with Gnome worked reasonably for me when I tried it. We have a guide here: Fedora 42 Installation on the Framework Laptop 12 - Framework Guides
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Would you happen to know any other desktop environments with decent touch support? Maybe a i3-like window manager that might be good with the 12?
I’m using Bazzite GNOME, and I can log in just fine, but it’s still not perfect.
- Firefox seems to be the only browser that automatically shows the OSK when needed. There are some flags that supposedly fix this for Brave, but they have only made things worse for me.
- The screen does not always rotate back when switching into laptop mode. It seems to get stuck when the device was asleep at some point.
- I use Dash to Panel to move app icons to the left, so that I can freely swipe up from the bottom of the screen to show the OSK. This panel disappears when coming back from a Steam game, until I rotate the device. (?)
- On several occasions, the trackpad stopped working, but the keyboard was active?
- The multitasking view can get messed up to the point where I have to log out and in again.
I wish I had more time to figure things out and send patches. Knowing that I can theoretically send patches feels good, though!
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Omarchy (which is Arch and Hyprland). It is what I am using and have been using on my FW12. Rotation needs some extra plumbing, but touch and pen all work even with that missing.
Edit: I have not configured a OSKB yet. I don’t really see myself needing one, with the keyboard attached and all, but I believe a Sway based solution works there as well. And based on what I said earlier, I believe Sway would also work.
@junaruga might be able to say more about that.
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Yup!
I am using Framework Laptop 12’s tablet moe on Sway, which is an i3-like Wayland-based window manager. It is not out of the box. You need to install the necessary software and configure files. My Lenovo Precision Pen 2 works on the Sway.
There is no support from Framework. But it is just about what I did to make my tablet mode work. You can check the following thread as a reference. I think you can apply a similar approach to other Wayland-based window managers, too. Let me know if you have questions. I am happy to answer.
The tablet functionalities are as follows. Each function works with a specific script or software.
- Auto-rotatng display
- Virtual keyboard
- Triggering the virtual keyboard by touch screen gesture (in my case)
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Personally, I am not using the GUI login display manager, such as GDM (Gnome Display Manager). I log in on the console in laptop mode.
If you want to log in on the lock screen in tablet mode, someone reported that it worked with an application.
There currently seems to be an issue with Ubuntu 25.10 where tablet mode doesn’t work. Usually the on-screen-keyboard pops up automatically when you touch the text input field on the login screen. That worked perfectly fine on Ubuntu 25.04 at least.
Since it hasn’t been mentioned yet: KDE on NixOS works fine.
i’m in the same boat. I somehow ended up on KDE (although on Debian, IMHO the distro doesn’t really matter here that much). I had trouble with rotation at first (Tablet mode in KDE? (auto-rotate, virtual keyboard)) but that’s mostly fixed.
(I actually get occasional crashes when rotating, actually. Kwin and sometimes firefox just crash! I still need to report this, not sure what’s up with that..)
Another problem is the status bar at the bottom doesn’t scale very well: sometimes there’s too many icons in the notification area on the right and that squeezes up the window list on the left which becomes unusable. I also miss volume buttons when in tablet mode…
I suspect GNOME would work as well, but I had trouble just getting used to it.
Finally, I am somewhat impressed (or not impressed, I guess) by how poor gesture support is across the board. Simple things like “back and forward” in Firefox, which work on the touchpad (two-finger scroll left goes back!) just don’t work at all on the touchscreen which I find just bizarre. PDF reader support is spotty: the best I’ve found so far is Calibre’s ebook-viewer but I find its UI really bizarre. But it’s the only one that, amazingly, allows for “tap for next page”. All the others either restrict you to tapping a tiny “next” button (GNOME’s, Okular) or have gestures that just don’t work so well (swipe left doesn’t work reliably).
I also find scrolling to be sub-par. On my phone, if i swipe up hard, a webpage will just scroll up and keep scrolling until it slowly decelerates or if i touch it. On this tablet, pages scroll while i swipe up, then immediately stop when i release the touch. This is what you’d expect on a mouse and touchpad, but on a tablet, somehow, I’ve built different expectations.
Those issues are all fixable, but it seems to me there’s a large variety of toolkit-level issues that need to be adressed, it’s not specific to KDE (as, for example, it affects Firefox which is GTK-based, AFAIK)…
I have played with a ton of DEs and WMs.
- COSMIC, no tablet support so to speak of (yet).
- KDE, pretty dang good, but floating windows are annoying and the best tiling extension is broken with a virtual keyboard ATM.
- Plasma Mobile, actually really good, but it drove me nuts not having the ability to split screen apps in laptop mode.
- Sway, no complaints. Requires some work to get working, but by grabbing and modifying parts of SXMO, it’s pretty sweet.
- Hyprland. It’s decentish. Looks good, runs OK, is fairly unstable, don’t use the Hyprgrass plugin for gestures and just stick with SXMO’s LISGD, and the community sucks. In short, usable, but certainly not a recommend.
- River. Honestly super cool project, and have not played around with it nearly enough. It’s a tough tool to work with, but certainly a recommend for the right user!
- Niri. I have only been using it for a couple of days, but I can’t see myself going back. It’s got some bugs for sure, but the workflow is so nice, and it has nigh Sway like stability. I am withholding full judgment until I have used it more, but as of now, 10/10 would recommend. As for tablet stuff, like any of the Wayland compositors mentioned above, you have to do your due diligence, LisGD for gestures and WVKBD for keyboard, but it seems like the devs are working toward better tablet support with things like tablet mode triggers inside the config.
As for distros, I have only tried Arch and Fedora on my 12. Fedora worked the best, with the tablet mode trigger somewhat broken in Arch (you can manage some ACPI hacks to get it working(ish) though). Personally, I would rather be using an APK based distro like Alpine, PostmarketOS or Chimera Linux, but Arch is a pretty easy and intuitive balance of power lightness and friendliness.
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oh yeah, that reminds me of a super annoyance in KDE: very often i tap on the window title by mistake and the window resizes instead of, well, just staying put. it’s hard to describe because i don’t even understand wtf is going on there. 
LOL, that’s KDE in a nutshell!
I like it over Gnome because I am not a Hobbit, so why should I use second settings app? (not to mention extensions). But KDE is just kinda feels perpetually slightly broken and it’s hard to describe why…
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funny you should say that, because i think the problem i am describing is actually related with how modern GTK apps merge controls into the application title bar, which makes it more difficult to operate those buttons without touching the title bar…
so, really, this feels more like a GNOME than KDE issue… but you know, happy to comfort existing trauma if that’s what you need 
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LOL, yeah, modern GTK is a mixed bag for sure. I generally prefer KDE’s ecosystem over Gnome’s (Dolphin, Okular, etc), and have seen way more GTK bugs on Wayland compositors then QT bugs.
Let’s just say there’s a reason I use Wayland compositors over desktop environments, LOL.
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I don’t own a Framework 12 yet, but over a year of experience with many LINUX distros on the StarLabs Star Lite Mk. V. LINUX tablet.
Re: Onscreen keyboard not working properly.
I traced this back to GNOME Accessibility and tried to do a source code pull so that I could try fixing the problem myself. Sadly, the GNOME projects are so complex that I could not figure out exactly which bit of code I’d have to work on or report bugs on.
Anyway, it’s not Ubuntu’s fault–it’s GNOME’s fault. Other distros using GNOME should also have the same problem.
Re: Niri
I too am liking Niri, after going through over a dozens different distros, each with their preferred Desktop Environment or Window Manager. Niri, or more specifically Wayland that it’s built on, does have some issues with some software that is not compatible with Wayland. I’ve also run into a problem with Steam for LINUX not working that might be because Steam expects the DE to be GNOME or KDE. I haven’t dug into that enough to be able to say for sure where the bug is coming from. It’s bad enough that I am considering dumping Niri and switching back to KDE Plasma or (ugh) GNOME.
Every LINUX distro I have tried so far has no palm rejection support at all, which effectively makes it impossible to use the tablet as a hands-held device. Yeah, I can place the tablet flat on a desk and draw on it with the stylus, but trying to couch-surf and hold the tablet in one or both hands while watching videos or browsing the web is very, very tedious.
For this reason alone, I can’t recommend any LINUX tablet hardware or any LINUX distro for tablets. Good palm rejection is a must to use it in tablet mode. Someone, probably Framework or StarLabs or Pine64, will have to sponsor the software development of proper palm rejection. I figure that the dev could look at Android Open Source Project source code and borrow ideas from how Android phones and tablets handle palm rejection.
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