In October, we shared the open source organization sponsorships we made to date in 2025. We’re now happy to share the latest batch of donations, bringing our total for the year to over $225,000. We focus on supporting projects that create the open source software that makes our products work, and the latest group includes a number of incredible distros.
First, we’re sponsoring Arch Linux, which is consistently in the top three most popular distros for Framework Laptop and Framework Desktop owners. This is an awesome power user choice with a very broad community and a deep knowledgebase in its wiki.
Downstream of that, we’re also supporting CachyOS, which is an Arch Linux based distro specifically focused on performance. CachyOS consistently comes up on top in performance benchmarks, like this recent one done by Phoronix on a Framework Desktop.
Next up, we have Debian, which is actually the first distro I used when I started my Linux journey in 2003. This is one of the more popular choices for Framework Laptop users, and it’s also the distro that Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and many other major distros are rooted in.
Next, we’re supporting Bazzite, which is one of the fastest growing Linux distros, and a very popular choice for Framework Desktop users interested in gaming. Bazzite is some of the clearest proof that the year of the Linux Desktop is here, enabling a range of games platforms with ease of use that relatively recently required Windows.
The last Linux distro in this batch of sponsorships is NixOS, which is a community supported distro across each of our products. In addition to being popular in the Framework Community, NixOS is also the distro of choice for one of our firmware engineers, making it one of the first distros we test new hardware with.
Finally, we’re sponsoring both FreeBSD and NetBSD. We’ve been working with FreeBSD throughout the year as part of their Laptop Support and Usability Project, and we’re happy to support the foundation with funding as well. While NetBSD doesn’t work on our products yet (as far as we know), we love their mission of extreme portability and keeping older computers from turning into e-waste.
You can see our full set of 2025 sponsorships in the table here. We have a few more currently in progress that we’ll announce in the next batch. As always, please let us know of any other organizations you believe we should sponsor.
Coming back to the topic of the thread, it started with a question around who we fund and why. We took that prompt to provide transparency around the sponsorships we provide, both in the earlier update and in this most recent post, and we will continue to keep the blog post up to date. We also set up a path for all of you to provide input on who you believe we should fund, which helped influence the recent and some of the upcoming sponsorships.
Outside of that, this thread has moved far beyond the original question. We deliberately kept it open to allow a venue for continued feedback and discussion while laying out clear guidelines to attempt to keep conversation constructive and free from personal attacks or harassment. Unfortunately, that has repeatedly not been the case, and this thread has required a disproportionate amount of moderation work from our small team of moderators. To keep the overall community forum manageable and productive (which it very much is outside of this thread), we are now closing this thread. If you have any further proposals around sponsorships, please use the form we shared in the blog post.