Greetings, first time here. I have never owned a Framework laptop, and I was looking for a tablet pc for my school work. This laptop interested me the most. Since I am a Linux user, compatibility comes first. So here are my questions:
Will Debian 13 (when it comes out this year) be supported (hacks and workarounds are fine as long as it doesn’t break frequently). If not, I can go with Arch too, but I rather go with Debian this time. (anything based on Fedora and Ubuntu are off the table) I looked at the compatibility table for FW13 and didn’t see any mentions of Debian, so I’m curious.
When the laptop folds, does it disable the keyboard. I often use my tablet in my hand instead of putting it on a surface, so it would be great if it does.
Is there a possibility for AMD CPU in the coming year? If not, how does Linux play with Intel on this device’s CPU? It usually works ok, but I would prefer AMD for compatibility.
As the FW 12 isn’t out yet, it’s tough to comment on specific Linux distros. But keep in mind, while Debian based distros aren’t “officially” supported by FW, that just means that the team won’t dedicate warranty support to it, or may ask you to try a “supported” distro as part of the troubleshooting process if you have an issue and go to them for warranty support. But there are plenty of folks running all kinds of distros successfully on the FW 13. Again, this doesn’t speak specifically to the FW 12, but I don’t imagine there’s any reason it would be any different with the 12. Touchscreen and pen support is a new animal. We’ll just have to see how each distro/desktop environment supports that.
Framework has specifically said that the keyboard is disabled when folded into “tablet” mode.
Framework rarely, if ever, comments on upcoming products/updates until they are essentially ready to go, so we won’t know about any potential, future AMD mainboard for the FW 12 until it’s virtually complete and close to being open to pre-orders. I will say that I would be extremely surprised if an AMD version released this year. The last of the pre-order batches for the FW 12 likely won’t even ship until sometime in Q3. Anything is possible, but I doubt there will be an AMD option any time soon. And, for better or worse, we won’t know about it until it’s all but ready to go on sale.