We want to know your preference! Please take a moment to participate in our poll and tell us your primary Linux distribution for Framework Desktop. Your input will help us better understand the community’s choices and preferences. If you are dual-booting, frequently switching between different distros, or using a distro not listed here, please let us know in the comments. Thank you for your participation!
I’ve chosen Debian since this has been my goto distro until now and I would prefer running that.
But I will install Fedora instead for the only reason that support for strix halo is still cutting edge and Debian is slow to update and a little behind on kernels.
I voted Bazzite because I like it for gaming but I am dual booting with Fedora for AI/Desktop use as that seems to have the best support so far. Bazzite being Fedora based too so can’t go wrong with that.
In the past I’ve been an arch and Debian kind of guy, but since I’m getting my desktop to act as a local ai server I’m going to go for Fedora, a Distro I’d never considered before, but the plasma variant because I just can’t stand gnome. (I used to really dislike KDE and love gnome about 15 years ago, before they radically changed things and was a cinnamon fan until my steamdeck introduced me to plasma and now I can’t see me using anything else)
I put it on my laptop (not an framework one yet) and it supported the screen flipping over into tablet mode, the fingerprint scanner and the stylus out of the box, so I’m even considering switching my 3 other boxes in the house over to fedora too to keep everything on the same distro. They’re currently 2x Debian and 1x win 11 because of the egpu that’s attached as my current mini ai box.
The default Kernel 6.12 does the job on Debian Trixie on the Framework-Desktop. I’m not in need for a 6.16 Kernel. But there are some improvements for Strix Halo in the newer Kernel.
Still not got my desktop yet (this week hopefully! It’s paid for), but the past few months i switched my laptop to linux to test things out. (Thinkpad A285, AMD 2700u)
Bazzite worked really well, but hit a brick wall trying to install a VPN, FU the OSA censorship/privacy nightmare
The immutable filesystem got too much in the way trying to install a VPN.
Tried again with Fedora everything has worked out fine since. So i’ll probably aim for this on the FW desktop.
Will be installing W11 first, mainly for comparing benchmarks from my old and new systems, but planning to switch to Fedora after that
KDE does have their own distro (KDE neon but it is mostly intended as a reference implamantation) but it seems they are working on an actually intended for consumers os called KDE linux (not a huge fan of the name but it could be a lot worse) which currently seems to be in alpha.
My guess it’s a different consumer base, the fw desktop is heavily targeted at the ai crowd which is heavily skewed towards “just throw some prebuilt image on there and hit run”.
