We want to know your preference! Please take a moment to participate in our poll and tell us your primary Linux distributionfor Framework Laptop 13. 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 selected ubuntu in the poll, but for clarity, i’m actually running xubuntu, an xfce variant on ubuntu. (still on 22.04 lts, hadn’t quite felt brave enough to forcibly move to 24.04 lts before the point release yet, which is when the natural transition prompts occur.)
I think Framework has been very wise by targeting Fedora and Ubuntu.
I have been toying with Bluefin OS. It is fantastic, BUT is in its infancy. There are many things that don’t work on it due to its imutable nature. (Crossover, VMWare Workstation, etc.) In the long run, solutions will be found, and I think this is the way forward for desktop Linux that really sees a net of improvements and ensuring stability.
In essence, when Framework certifies a Linux distro, it is Framework footing the bill for the support of that distro on their product. If you look at the forums here, Linux questions dominate the discussion. Nothing bad about this really, but just an observation and something to be aware of. It is low hanging fruit, but is also a lot more than that.
TLDR; I selected Bazzite/Bluefin, but Im right now on Kinoite, which is an atomic spin of Fedora, like Bazzite or SilverBlue.
I started my journey on FW13 amd with Fedora 40 Beta, which was okay. Wanted to try immutable distro for a while, and took a chance with SilverBlue. Immutables have different idiom and workflows, which I did not understood at first, like @2disbetter . Then new Plasma+wayland released, with support for HDR, which was a show stopper for daily driving Linux for me personally for a long time. I took my time to understand how OSTree and package layering works, also took advantage of toolbx/distrobox (ptyxis has awesome native integration of those). And I must say that I solved all of my major workflow issues and use cases. I see a future in immutable distros, because I can still tinker with many aspects, and easily rollback all of my changes - huge plus for stability and peace of mind.
I believe its smart to keep supporting a couple of major distros, it keeps things diversified. With immutable rolling distros like Fedora/Atomics its a bleeding edge of progress, but with recent news regarding Red Hat, its unclear how things will end up. While stagnant Ubuntu is still de-facto standard for many, and its a separate corporate entity, which is still popular with server deployments
Just installed Xubuntu 24.04 on a new Framework 13 AMD. Looks good with it. Tried the current Debian first, with Xfce4 as the dash, but it was flakey in too many ways.
Gentoo is my distro of choice. The official support of only Fedora and Ubuntu is completely reasonable. I have no complaints. Both are very mature distributions with significant support.
I noticed the popularity of Arch. Arch is on my list of distros to try.
