I am considering a Framework 13 and wanted to know generally what the best CPU is for the price?
Also, I wanted to ask for a recommendation for what distro to use. Preferably I would like something similar to SteamOS, as that is what I am familiar with, but I don’t need it to be gaming focused, so I don’t know if Bazzite would be a good fit.
I am new to this community so I’m sorry if this is a question you get a lot, I just want to hear from people who have experience with the 13 before I buy mine.
Imo the main problem with questions like this is, we don’t know what your use case is.
If you’re just looking for a general purpose computer for some web browsing, e-mail etc then pretty much anything will do, so grab the cheapest (likely the 11th Gen Intel, if you can find one in-stock).
If you’re looking for a gaming device, then first off, I don’t think this is the best bang for your buck but you could do some light gaming on the HX370… I’m not entirely sure if the HX model is actually worth the uplift over the 7840U, but you’d need to go second hand for a 7840U it seems (although that probably won’t be an issue, I imagine there will be a lot of mainboards coming on the second hand market shortly).
As for distro’s, I personally am a fan of Fedora at the moment. It’s running really well so far on my 11th Gen Intel with everything I can think of just working out of the box (I’m using 44 with Gnome but I’ve also ran KDE in the past). There should be plenty of help on here for Bazzite if you decide to go that route.
A Gaming focused distro will not drastically change your experience. Maybe it comes with steam preinstalled or it doesn’t, thats what I would consider the biggest difference. Bassite & Cashy seem to have good defaults so I would recommend them (Default settings are the most important item for newbies to Linux).
For the hardware, the 7640U and 7840U seem to be quite good all rounders (Depends on use cause but generally would recommend he 7840U) DDR4 boards seems to be hard to find, I say this because DDR4 is cheaper. The use case is the most important question.
The Core Ultra Series 1 and the ryzen 7000 series boards are pretty similar in MOST use cases. The large difference is the power draw limit. The intel boards can draw much more power but also (according to reviewers seems to have more battery life in lighter use cases). I also see more reports software issues in the forums with the ryzen boards (bios & sleep/wifi). AVOID 13th gen intel boards, they have an inherent design flaw specific to that generation (includes desktop & mobile). The Intel boards also have 4 Thunderbolt 4 ports (applies to all intel boards and is a LOT of said ports). The AMD boards have different ports depending on the generation (I recommend checking these out). Also screen will have a small effect but COULD be noticable, depends on use case.