@nrp has said “We’ve sent out large quantities of hardware to folks at Fedora, Bluefin, Bazzite, NixOS, Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Omarchy, and many other distros”
Did those distros include Gentoo, Slackware, or non-Linux projects like ReactOS?
No. I don’t speak for Framework. But I’m pretty sure they didn’t get in contact with those projects.
Personally, I have no interest at all in the above projects. I don’t know why they exist. Maybe there’s a reason, but it seems like people create distros just to claim they did something. Whereas Slackware, Gentoo and ReactOS all represent significant advances in the world of operating systems.
and what are these “advances” that these specific ones provide?
Framework does not have to contribute to a project in order for you to use it. Just use what you like.
That said, slackware is weird, Gentoo is a waste of power and time for normal use, etc. those projects don’t need support from a random laptop manufacturer.
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Instead of twiddling a few options or config files and then declaring oneself a genius, which is how most distros have started, these projects’ founders did the following:
- Slackware was the first viable and available distro period that appeared in the mid-1990s and is still available today.
- Gentoo prevents meddling by would-be wrongdoers by building everything from source code during the OS installing, so the risk of malware added by “activist” distro maintainers is eliminated.
- ReactOS is the only viable attempt at reverse engineering Windows from scratch as an open-source project.
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By that logic, no project does.
Bold statement. NixOS for instance is the largest immutable distro in the Linux world and is also gaining a lot of traction from big companies. Nix is also the biggest package manager for Linux and MacOS. Nix together with GUIX has been one of the biggest advancements in the immutable Linux world.
Gentoo, Slackware and ReactOS are all pretty niche distros and not that widely used anymore nowadays.
The Distros listed by nrp are all popular distros that are widely used by a lot of people. Framework wants to get the best support for distros that a lot of people use, not niche distros that maybe a couple tens of people use
OK good, that is a step forward. But the others? Not likely worthwhile.
As for numbers of users, that’s a poor argument. You’re using a logical fallacy called Argumentum ad populum. Even if many people think a distro is good, asserting that it is because they think so is fallacious: It doesn’t prove that distro is good. Lots of things are promoted as good that aren’t worthwhile e.g. smoking, boozing and Microsoft products.
I’d say SteamOS is the largest immutable distro (running on Steam Decks, etc)…..and about to get even more popular with the new steam machine.
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So why is it so little used today?
Oh great, so the wrongdoers can add some stray files into the mix with unknown consequences.
Reverse engineer Windows? You call that an advantage ? 
People use shallow thinking when selecting their preferred distro. Then when they find the distro they chose is giving them problems, like it’s slow because it’s bloated, or some systemd feature is found to have security vulnerabilities, their ignorance of better options leads them to complain about Linux in general, as if the bad distros represent all of Linux. It’s sort of like someone who eats only McDonalds food lamenting that all food is unhealthy, or a woman who dates only jerks complaining that all men are trash.
It’s the only way to have a form of Windows without spyware, so yes it’s an advantage.
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Okay now I’m 100% convinced this is just a troll account created to see what reactions it can generate…. If the name didn’t already give it away lol.
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framework should give free hardware to the blessed operating system of chromeos… it needs all the help it can get! 