Any plans to support Ubuntu on the new FW Desktop?
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It’s not likely that the Framework team will offer first party support of the distro immediately. They have a small team and a lot of products to support for such a small team so they must prioritize their efforts.
That being said I have no doubt that Ubuntu will work perfectly fine. the APUs that are used in the desktop have been around long enough to have solid support in the kernel and for Ubunti to have picked up supported versions. And of course it’s a popular enough distro that there will be community support for it.
So, just because the Framework team doesn’t have the resources to add the distro to their officially supported operating systems does not mean you can’t use it and have a fantastic time with it. that’s the beauty of Linux after all.
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I’m not with framework, but that’s basically a question of time.
New hardware is traditionally on Linux supported (very often) first of fedora, as they have a rather rapid refrsh cycle.
Eg fedora was also the first to switch to pipewire (and accept the pain for half a year or so working out the kinks) OTOH it was also the first Linux distribution that had working high fidelity Bluetooth head set support. No more video calls where you sound like you are calling from a payphone or you have to use a wired headset.
In the case of the new high-end Ryzen it’s AFAiK the issue that you need rather new kernels which fedora provides, while Ubuntu does not. And obviously the video, etc packages linked to it.
But it’s not exactly a new experience , when I got my Lenovo T14s with a totally hot new Zen 2 APU in 2020, one of the first laptops with Zen 2 I selected it because it was certified to run Ubuntu (small print with OEM image, which you cannot get AFAiK in the EU), so I had to go with fedora then too.
(As stock Ubuntu was simply too unstable on the brand new hardware)
I’m gonna try with Debian Trixie, it’s in dev now and releasing August 9th. It’s not Ubuntu but it’s closer. Linus is Linux, I’m confident it will be fine. You need a recent kernel. We will see.
Phoronix has recently tested Strix Halo laptops with both, the current LTS and non-LTS Version of Ubuntu. I am therefore pretty confident that the Framework Desktop should work just fine with both. The LTS version is also one of the distros that is officially supported by AMD rocm.
Is that not the most popular, also supported by all the laptops? It would seem very short sighted not to support Ubuntu out of the gate.
Ubuntu has a much more conservative update cycle than Fedora, meaning that if and when a bug is introduced to the distro for new hardware such as often is the case with Framework devices it can take a while for the fix to be picked up in the distro.
I can understand why Framework would want a faster update cycle for their supported distros to ensure that bug fixes, and performance improvements are realized quickly for their userbase.
There is nothing stopping you from running Ubuntu on the Framework Desktop, and in fact I expect it will work quite well, but because of the long update cycle and need to ration team resources to support it’s quite understandable for Ubuntu to not be an officially supported distribution.
I actually find myself on the other end of that knife myself. I use Arch as my favored distro and that’s not supported either, which means that I do occasionally get to experience bugs introduced in new kernels before they get picked up by Fedora, sometimes they’re issues that never would have been encountered on fedora because the bugfix got picked up before the change that introduced the bug even hit Fedora’s main kernel.
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