Thanks for sharing, found it to be an interesting watch. Hopefully Framework 12 support in OpenSUSE is pretty smooth.
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I’ve got a preorder of a 12 in batch 9 so quite far away, but I’ll be either trying Manjaro or Arch, mostly because I like the ‘no big number release cycle’ and the utter freedom to make a smoking ruin of your daily driver, it keeps things zesty! 
However in the meantime my daily driver is a docked Steamdeck running Bazzite (this is being written on it right now).
Two big reasons, one is for the price it’s a pretty interestingly specced computermabob, and two it’s powerful enough to play most of the games I want to play on it.
…however it only spends half it’s alivetime being used for games, the rest of the time I use it for all sorts of stuff, including software dev…
…which brings me to ‘why Bazzite and not native SteamOS?’ and the real reason is Bazzite will happily let me install into the OS if I try hard enough, most of everything is flatpacked, but occasionally I’ll find something that really would be better off actually installed, and SteamOS really doesn’t want you to do that, but Bazzite will let you, if you know what you are doing (it kinda hides to hoops a little bit).
I note the setup guides for linux indicate that only Ubuntu 25.04 supports tablet mode atm… I would like to use mint but wonder what extra functionality I would be missing out on without tablet mode, e.g. I don’t care about not having an on-screen keyboard.
I think you’re reading that incorrectly. When using Ubuntu, only the latest version (25.04) supports tablet mode. Other Linux distibutions like Fedora or Bazzite also support tablet mode (often even out of the box with even less needed setup). I’m not sure if Mint supports it, but it’s not an official supported distro, and it often uses older software, so it may not be ideal.
I’m reading it off the Mint installation guide on the FW website:
You could be right that the other distros also support tablet mode (just that it hasn’t been tested/verified as working on the FW12 yet), and perhaps there is a way to get Mint to support it as well, but yes I understand I’d be going with a non-officially supported version.
Just for reference, this guide linked from the Ubuntu 25.04 guide essentially recommends Fedora or Bazzite for tablet mode instead of Ubuntu. Fedora and Bazzite are offically supported distros. But you’re right that Mint doesn’t look supported.
Yeah, the Fedora and Bazzite guides explicitly call out that tablet mode works. I think the Mint guide needs a minor update. @catastrophic
Tried Bazzite for the first time and it’s been great so far. It’s great having controller support out of the box, because I can’t seem to get it to work at all in Mint. Also having official support is really nice especially for a 2-in-1 device because I really don’t want to be messing with drivers and other dependencies for hardware.
Not sure if I quite understand your question, but if it’s in regards to whether Linux Mint supports Tablet Mode, the install guide calls out that Tablet Mode is unsupported in Step 1. If you do require Tablet Mode however, it directs you to install Ubuntu 25.04. Hope that answers your question.
We mostly meant that it might be helpful to edit that copy to also call out the other officially supported distros (specifically Fedora and Bazzite)
Trying out Archlinux!
I’ve had some issues with my Batch 1 FW12’s sensors, which support are looking in to. I’ve tried quite a few Distros and LDEs.
I’ve got a reasonable amount of experience with Linux Servers / CLI, but less with desktop.
kUbuntu - worked well, Wayland meant that touch worked largely as I expected. Had some issues with the onscreen keyboard
Fedora - other than hating Gnome3, it seemed to work reasonable well. Wayland again, onscreen keyboard worked when it wanted to. had some issues with it not appearing when tapping text in tablet mode
Mint Cinnamon - Really wanted 125-150% scale, which I enabled via advanced mode. It’s running X11 still, and there were some notable issues with touch control not moving text windows as expected.