We want to know your preference! Please take a moment to participate in our poll and tell us your primary Linux distribution for Framework Laptop 12. 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 get my 12 soon, but I plan to use NixOS, Rocky Linux (Red Hat based), and Windows occasionally if I need it. Part of the reason I chose the 12 is that it only takes a couple minutes to switch out a drive, so i can have complex partition set ups on multiple 2230 ssd’s rather than try and dual boot it and it getting all weird and buggy.
NixOS is my daily drive, but I have Rocky for RHCSA practice and Windows for (future) Comptia classes.
Note that “KDE Plasma” in the poll is a desktop environment, like Gnome / XFCE / Cinnamon / Sway / etc. It’s not a separate distro; it’s a selectable option for many distros.
My best guess is that they meant KDE Neon, which is KDE’s unstable testing environment for Plasma and all of their app suite. That would make the most sense to me.
I’m using Kubuntu. Used to do arch based distro’s for my e-waste laptops only useful as internet books, but I’ve been using Ubuntu for my server VM’s which makes having everything same=same better for me. I highly value KDE for the desktop experience, but Tablet mode and power management took a tolerable to me amount of tinkering. The time-sink was still measured in multiple hours, and I wouldn’t recommend it to myself if I was just starting out with Linux even though for a normal laptop it would have been beginner friendly.
I’d love to try Omarchy, but the FW12 is too small to do a lot of tiling, and I really want to get the most out of the touchscreen / 2-in-1.
I’ve tried elementary OS, which theoretically has good gesture/touch support. It doesn’t support fractional scaling, so I set it to 200% and decreased the font size, which also made the tap targets larger. Its design looks so good on my colorful FW12! Unfortunately, it is quite buggy on X11, and on Wayland the on-screen keyboard does not work at all. =(
KDE has better fractional scaling, but the OSK felt hacky to me.
So, GNOME it is. I went with Bazzite-GNOME, but might rebase to Bluefin-DX later.
Omarchy was just an installed script that could be run by the wget -qO- https://omarchy.org/install | bash on Arch Linux until they provided the iso image on the Omarchy version 2.0.0 on 25th August 2025, 3 weeks ago. So, I assume some people are using Omarchy on Arch Linux rather than Omarchy as a distribution.
I’m on Bazzite DX, started with Bluefin DX. I switched because I really wanted to be able to run Android apps on Waydroid. I did try out Android Studio first, but want compare with Waydroid. Using DX because I wanted to play with VMs and some minor programming. Have Windows and Mac in VMs and containers. Having a blast!
I’ve been using Debian and Debian-based distributions for about 25 years now, most of the time some variant of Ubuntu. However, I don’t like snap and I do like vanilla Gnome. And I prefer a distribution that is independent from any particular company, so I run Debian on all my computers now.
Omarchy all day and every day! It is the first Linux distro (Let’s be honest, it is just Arch + Hyprland + awesome configuring) that honestly just works and hasn’t broken after numerous updates. I have tried SO many distros and they all eventually end up breaking.
Omarchy has the full financial backing of 37signals and DHH. It is a distro that just focuses on being great. It has seen MASSIVE developer support cropping up. It is just a breath of fresh air in the open source world and I love it!
And it runs PERFECTLY on the Framework 12 (minus rotation, but this fixes that: GitHub - 2disbetter/FW12Rotate: Framework 12 rotation application specifically for Omarchy Linux . ) In fact, I am seeing the best standby power out of all of Framework’s device on the FW 12 running Omarchy. I am seeing about ~.4-.6% battery drain per hour on it. I mean the FW 12 can last for two whole days with about 6 hours of work on those two days. My workloads are usually pretty heavy. But for me this is incredible. I know we are seeing some of those power gains from the single channel of RAM, but I’ll TAKE it! Talk about a kind of silver lining!
Omarchy is the only distro that has me believing that 2025 might actually be the year of the Linux desktop.
Note: Omarchy is geared towards full-stack developers and the like. I am not any of that. C/C++ based application and system developer, and it was trivial to configure for my needs. The 80s-90s ambient polish is simply gorgeous as well. Omarchy captures that same 80s magic and it is hard to describe without experiencing.
I think most people are pretty dug into their distro of choice. Linux veterans already have this figured out, and so I don’t think they see much need to distro hop.
I wouldn’t read into it too much here. My other guess is that it is possible the main adopters of Omarchy don’t frequent the FW forum.
Turns out the less weird stuff distros do to arch the less it breaks XD.
While I would not really call myself a linux veteran I am definitely a bit of a creature of habit and tend to stick with stuff if they work for me even if I know there is newer/better stuff around (still using sway when there is hyperland, using screen instead of tmux and stuff like that).
Or that users of explicitly opinionated distros may be less likely to state their own opinions XD (or they just report as arch)
Still a Linux newbie, and since Fedora on Framework is a working “out-of-the-box” combination, I currently went with Fedora. And interested to test drive Linux Mint in the future.
Mainly used to debian / ubuntu, partially also due to Raspberry PI.
