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.
To be fair, the 11th gen did get an update that can be installed through LVFS so they seem to make an effort. But yeah my experience so far with the 12th gen has not been good (firmware wise anyway).
I love my AMD framework 13. I use it with Arch and have solved or worked-around most of the issues so far, even tho battery life is still pretty bad.
Having said that, I’d say it’s not a good choice for linux if you want “just works, no strings attached”. This goes for the “officially supported” distroes as well, where I’d argue that things are even worse as software update cycles there tend to take longer.
It’s good if you’re ok with tinkering, it’s “linux friendly” but I wouldn’t call it a good choice for linux.
This week Framework released a beta EC update for the AMD version and you could installed it with fwupd. I have the impression they care to support LVFS
I’m using Solus on my AMD Framework 13 and I know one of the Devs is getting a Framework 16 so I can say I is and should continue to be well supported there too
To be fair, almost all Linux issues on FW13 AMD have been due to the newness of the AMD 7040 platform, rather than Framework-specific.
Back in September, before I got my FW13 with AMD Ryzen 7840U, I spent some time playing with a new, Ryzen Pro 7840U-based Thinkpad P14s. Out of the 5 distros I had on my Ventoy USB, only one was able to even boot into a workable installation environment without kernel command line tweaks. Arch was useable, but crashing desktop, the screen flickering to black, color artifacts, and iffy suspend and resume all were happening quite a bit.
So, perhaps AMD 7040 isn’t the best Linux choice, at the moment, if you want something problem-free. For me, the 780M iGPU was a must, and so I knew I was choosing AMD over Intel, regardless of its current maturity level.
After playing with the Thinkpad, the only thing I felt it had over the FW13 was a richer set of BIOS options (partly due to it being the Pro version of the APU), and, specifically, the ability to set the UMA buffer size to 8GB. I was still disappointed that 8GB was the limit - I wanted more, for StableDiffusion - but that was better than the 4GB on the FW. (I’m mentioning the UMA buffer size because it’s particularly relevant for Linux: Windows drivers and ML frameworks depend on it less.)
Unlike the first couple of batches, the FW13 AMD I received already had the up-to-date BIOS installed. I still needed to upgrade the fingerprint reader firmware, and that was slightly stressful, due to misleading messages the upgrade tool was reporting. But, functionally, the upgrade worked for me on the first try, following the installation instructions Framework provided for Linux. At no point did I have to boot into Windows. And, if I understand it correctly, the experience was improved since, with the more recent version of the tool.
I can’t really compare the community sizes, but the Linux-related discussions here have been both numerous and tremendously helpful. I feel the community support for Linux, including FW participation in it, has been incredible.
