Solus KDE (This is my home Linux distro, and even though it won’t be optimized like Ubuntu or Fedora out of the gate, I can’t quit you <3)
Windows 11 (for games that don’t work in Proton, or perhaps Blender if the HIP rendering isn’t ironed out under other Linux distros)
Ubuntu or Fedora (because I want to take advantage of these two distros having special features like decreased power consumption for the hardware)
I think installing 3 Linux distros might be overkill for my single 2 TB 2280 drive, and I’m leaning toward Ubuntu because some reviews so far have quoted that under Ubuntu there is better battery life.
Does anyone have any suggestions to offer in light of this choice between Fedora or Ubuntu?
Go with Ubuntu if you are okay with being occasionally forced to use their packaging format snaps and you don’t mind older packages.
Choose Fedora if you want to get tested but newer packages and you accept the next release could mess with your current workflow.
Fedora is usually one of the first distros to use new Linux technologies and remove older ones. For example Fedora voted to remove x11 support from The KDE plasma spin. I’m pretty sure there was a similar vote for the flagship gnome version, but I’m not sure how that one panned out.
Yeah, thanks for the breakdown of these two. I’ve used both distros in the past and last settled on Fedora Kinoite (before heading back to Solus). In this question, I’m specifically curious about the hardware work that either distro has done to work with Framework to squeeze more battery life out of the laptop.
In a cursory glance at the docs, I’ve seen that there are some more workarounds for Framework and Fedora than there are for Framework and Ubuntu. But I have also heard that the stock kernel for 22.04 doesn’t have everything the Framework 16 needs?
I’m looking for a bit more insight into the work that’s been done under the hood for power management and other hardware features.
This is pretty much correct - Ubuntu requires some manual tweaks and fixes to be fully up and running with the 16, whereas Fedora works out of the box.
It’s also worth noting that the Fedora SIG recently voted in favor of packaging ROCm by default, so it may be easier to get applications such as Blender working with full hardware acceleration.
That’s great news. I really do enjoy using Fedora, and not having to hack the ROCm drivers to work with Blender is very appealing. Thanks for your opinions here. It makes sense that the later kernel (with Fedora) would work with newer hardware.
I assume that the review of the “some reviews” is Elevated System’s review. I am not sure if the person followed the instructions to optimize the battery life in Fedora for the review, especially the part about using the power-profiles-daemon in the Copr repository.
You can check the following pages if you install Fedora on Framework Laptop AMD.