I’ve not tried Qubes. I would suggest that if you’re new to Linux, you start with Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Either are going to have good levels of hardware support, and offer the kind of (mostly) works-out-of-the-box experience that makes it more straightforward.
Are you familiar with QubesOS certified laptops? Because Framework isn’t one of them
Given the entire OS is virtualized, if you haven’t turned VT-x and VT-d on in the UEFI, performance is gonna be painfully slow.
I see that bare minimum recommended amount of RAM is 16GB but since it’s all VMs I would think it might be more to get decent performance depending on how many VMs are running…
Have you tried an external mouse or other OS to see if your touchpad problems persist? That would tell you if it’s hardware or software at fault.
I don’t believe you saw me claim otherwise? But if OP doesn’t really know what they are doing then perhaps they should either stick to FW-supported distros for the FW12 or purchase a certified QubesOS compatible laptop.
OP may have accidentally turned them off, I don’t know. I’m just spitballing here. OP hadn’t even mentioned taking basic troubleshooting steps like checking external mouse, reseating touchpad/keyboard connectors, etc.
If there’s a problem only in QubesOS with the touchpad then it’s a software problem with QubesOS. Are there any other users of QubesOS using Framework laptops on their forums reporting issues? That might cut down significantly on how much work you have to troubleshoot what the error is. I think I have seen a few threads on this forum regarding QubesOS you could search up and see what they reported?
Fedora (KDE) is doing okay out of the box for me but I’ve used Debian (KDE) for the last 20 years, so I’m doing better there… Windows, however, I had to jump over the: I’m paying for it why do I have to fix it! …hurdle; I have that set to an experimental Insider build and it seems to be working much better that way? Both via GRUB.
The reason I’m trying Fedora is because it’s officially supported by Framework.
Many years ago the thing I liked about distro hopping was, just install again to fix it. Doh.
If you’re new, stick with the middleman Linuses, like Mint where people do stuff for you?
Edit\add: with Fedora and Windows we could also pay someone to be an admin. ;)
you could make qubes work on a framework 12, but it wouldn’t have very good battery life, and if you don’t have at least 32G of RAM the number of apps you could actually use would be limited. The 1334U is probably the best CPU for it - wildcat lake data isn’t really available yet.