Thanks everyone for jumping in and providing support! 100% agreed that the community is fantastic.
I want to add to and clarify the point around OS selection. We have seen that there is immense variety in the distros that everyone is interested in and using. We have had to focus on the few most popular ones to build official guides around: Framework Laptop - Framework Guides
Beyond that, we point to the Community where there are active threads for just about every distro available. Ultimately, we leave it up to each consumer to choose whether they want to take the safer path on using a distro that we have a guide for and that more of the community is on, or one that may have less guidance and more unknowns.
All of that said, we definitely want to make sure we resolve any and all issues that could be hardware related. The best way we can help with that is to decouple hardware and software by asking you to update to the latest BIOS and test out whether any of the same issues occur with one of the distros that we have done more testing around.
You’re correct. This is my first laptop that supports only EFI with no MBR. I created a USB drive from Windows using Rufus. After a few attempts at the laptop not recognizing the thumbdrive, I was finally able to enter the F12 boot menu, insert the drive, and see it appear. (I’d tried this a few time without success). Oddly, once the system recognized the drive, it did so through multiple reboots.
This is an old thread, but I wanted to add a note that might be helpful. I wanted to get memtest86 running on my new Framework 13 Pro. It turns out there are several versions.
There are what appear to be commercial versions available at Passmark. I tried the free image here, but it only got part-way into its boot sequence before showing a permanently blank screen.
So I reflashed my memory stick with the open source version, but that would not boot at all, until I disabled Secure Boot. Once I’d disabled that, the DOS-like screen of Memtest86+ sprang into life.