Looking to get a Laptop to run KDE Neon. The KDE Slimbooks look nice but am unsure about support from Europe. How well is Linux supported with Framework 13 laptops?
I may also be interested in Fedora Silverblue. Is the Atomic update Silverblue employs safer when doing OS upgrades on the Framework laptops?
I’m sure Framework supports Windows well, that’s probably where they get most of their business. Just wondering if Framework is a good choice for Linux or will I be buying into a series of problems?
Seems that Fedora and Ubuntu are officially supported but not much else if you stray away.
KDE Neon is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS so “should” be OK. Of course there will be risk with the latest KDE 6 version.
Fedora Silverlight is quite different from the Fedora 38/39. That leaves me less confident.
Was looking for honest opinions as to how viable the Framework platform is for Linux. Limiting users to one or two distributions gives me reason to not click “Continue to Checkout” and buy a framework.
I suppose worst case I could buy a copy of Windows 10 and sell the device on eBay. I’d rather not.
May look to see if there is hardware Linux nerds prefer.
Framework officially supports Fedora and Ubuntu. However, there are people running just about every flavor of Linux with good success. Granted, there are also plenty of issues that crop up when running various Linux configurations. But there is a wealth of good info in this community and plenty of folks willing to lend a helping hand if you run into little issues (or big ones). Framework is happy to have users run whatever version of Linux they wish. They simply will only officially “support” Fedora and Ubuntu. This is simply due to limited staff and limited resources. If someone running a different version of Linux has an issue with a laptop and reaches out to them for official support, they may ask them to test with a live USB of an “officially” supported distro to see if the issue persists. Unfortunately, there are just SO many variables when it comes to Linux, that Framework simply cannot commit to offering support for every distro and every configuration. But they certainly aren’t expecting people to limit their usage to only two versions of Linux. That’s just all they are able to offer official support for at this time. But I’ve seen Framework employees popping up in these forums to help with all kinds of problems with all kinds of Linux installs when they can. The same goes for many of the community members here.
I had never used Linux before Framework. Now I’m running a FW 13, AMD as my everyday laptop, running Fedora 39 with no issues. So, at least for me, Framework has been a great choice for Linux.
I run Void Linux on the Framework 12, and while Framework support is limited, due to them not being able to test every configuration, I have had barely any issues, most come from kernel regressions.
I think unless you are planning to get the 16, you should not have to many issues on Linux distros.
It works very well with various linux distros. They do have some officially supported distros, but really any distro with a reasonably modern kernel / mesa should be totally fine.
Ubuntu and Fedora are officially supported, which is limited but this also allows framework to provide documentation and support to Linux customers to best of their abilities.
That said, I was on Arch Linux for more than a year on my FW13 12th gen, most issues I faced were, software related (other than the brightness keys issue, which is now fixed on latest stable kernel), or stuff I was messing with. I’m currently on Fedora KDE spin for past few months.
I honestly can’t feel too much of a difference in usage, battery life etc between the two distro’s. If you do choose to use a different flavour of linux, you’ll be fine, we have support threads here for most popular distro’s you may use. Most things do translate well distro to distro, even if few things are done slightly differently.
A vibrant community, a guru in forum answering questions, supported hardware in mainline kernel and the open source nature of Linux makes Framework easy to run Linux.
it depends on what you mean by “support”. on the hardware side, everything works, so you should be fine with whichever 2023-2024 linux distribution, e.g. your question about fedora silverblue wouldn’t have a much different answer on a framework laptop vs. any other laptop where every piece works fine on linux.
framework “officially” supports fedora and ubuntu meaning that a vanilla install of those two is “guaranteed to work” but the same caveats apply, if you start recompiling stuff on your own on ubuntu and break your system support might tell you not to do that
on other distros, you’re on your own, but they still work.
IMHO the Framework 13 AMD has still some rough egdes. You can find topics about them on this forum: most will be probably fixed by framework or amd in a couple of kernel releases and most have workarounds (which I wonder if they are easy to apply by some linux novice user, they are pretty easy to me). Still I’m very happy with this laptop. Running KDE neon you might want to adapt the ubuntu 22.04 post-installation guide to your distro: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/linux-docs/blob/main/ubuntu-22.04-amd-fw13.md.
Silverblue (and the KDE version Kinoite) works just fine on the Framework 13 (11th Gen). The atomicity of Silverblue/Kinoite is the only difference between either of those and Fedora workstation. The current version of Silverblue is 39, just like Workstation. If the current version of the AMD or Intel Framework machines supports the current verison of Fedora, that includes Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic, or Budgie Atomic.
There’s no limitation, beyond what is required to support the hardware. If you understand how the kernel and device drivers work, you can pick and choose whatever distribution you want, and update your kernel to something new enough to support the hardware (if your distribution of choice ships with an older kernel like Debian 12).
I have run Pop OS! with an nVidia RTX card in an eGPU rig on my Framework, and it worked just fine.
If you want something else, there are a few manufacturers who support the niche. System76, Star Labs, and of course Dell and Lenovo all offer hardware that works just fine with Linux as well (though they only claim compatibility with Ubuntu LTS).
IMO Framework is the best Linux laptop. I started with Fedora on my FW13, and then I switched to Arch. Both have worked flawlessly.
The only real issue I can think of is that of fractional scaling. The FW13 has a fairly high resolution, with an unusual aspect ratio. Until recently, fractional scaling on Linux wasn’t that good. However, in the last few months, both KDE Plasma and GNOME have worked quite a bit on their fractional scaling implementation - and it works great now.
Framework has the biggest community (compared to other Linux laptop vendors) - there’s a lot of documentation.
I’m sure Framework supports Windows well, that’s probably where they get most of their business. Just wondering if Framework is a good choice for Linux or will I be buying into a series of problems?
IIRC most polls of Framework owners on this community and on the subreddit have showed a strong Linux majority.
The KDE Slimbooks
I would skip the KDE Slimbooks. Your best alternate choices (after the framework) are Lenovo and System76.
Chiming in to clarify the Linux landing page and what it means.
We have folks running every they like and we do what we can to support those untested distros. The idea is we have two distributions where we are working with the development teams to ensure ongoing compatibility.
We also have community support releases like Arch, where the community provides help when a user runs into an issue.
As many have already pointed out Linux remains Linux, and as such any distribution is able to run just fine, the only thing that will change is how well it does out of the box and how much Framework specific guidance will be available in case it doesn’t .
But I guess that’s a concern you will end up having with any laptop really.
I’m running gentoo perfectly fine on my AMD Framework.
The fact that Framework endorses running Linux on a few distributions officially is something to care about, since it means hardware was chosen with that in mind.
I have a 12th gen that works great with qubesos, kubuntu, and nixos in my experience so far.
That said, their firmware support is bad. If you go into it expecting vulnerabilities to be patched in a timely manner, you’d gonna be very disappointed. The 12th gen has had known vulnerabilities for almost 2 years now and has never gotten a single firmware update (besides two buggy beta releases).
Right now for the 12th gen, there has never been an update fully released (non-beta).
If you want to install the most recent beta update though, then you’ll have to either install windows and update through windows or you’ll have to use the EFI-based updater which has some known bugs with it not actually updating all components reliably. And if you go the EFI route, you’ll have to get a little clever downloading it because they deleted the link to stop folks from using it since it’s known to be buggy.
Gotcha. So updates are available but not readily installable. I would classify that as the computer not being supported in Linux lol.
I have been messing around with Windows-to-go bootable USB to try and see if I can get it to run BIOS utilities or not. To create a Windows-to-go USB you need a windows program like Rufus, which does work in wine fairly readily. Still futzing with it. If I get it working maybe I’ll post a how-to post.
