B16 could come way quicker than I expected… meaning I need to pick up the pace playing with distros and make a damn decision lol
Hey Comrade_Stiv
Elevated Systems posted a YouTube video reviewing 4 alternate distros:
[Framework 16: Best Laptop for Linux Users?]
DISTRO - Desktop
1 Linux Mint - Cinnamon
2 Pop!_OS - Gnome
3 Arch Based:
So there might be some community interest in your findings regarding linux distro comparisons and decision.
Edward_Mark
Would be nice if also threw in Ubuntu or Fedora for comparison, I assume he used the Mint Edge version? The LTS kernel 5.15 on Mint 21.3 seems a bit too old no?
Hey Nomad,
Elevated System did post a previous YouTube for FW13-AMD touching on
1 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - Gnome
2 Fedora 39 - Gnome
3 Arch based
Manjaro - KDE Plasma
EndeavourOS -Xfce
After looking at the Community Guidelines, I’m not sure I should post a link to his video without his permission. Just search YouTube for “Linux on the AMD Framework, TESTED!”
Re: Mint version
I didn’t pick up if he specified that he tested with the Edge version or not.
BTW,
He also posted 2 other FW16 YouTube videos that may be of interest:
Huh, thought I’ve seen a video of him testing Windows 11, Fedora and Ubuntu on the FW16 before, might have been another creator.
Will have to watch the others later.
Personally, I’m going to be going Debian Testing (Trixie) on ZFS Root. Will make it easy to simply do a snapshot before each update, and revert back fairly easily if any update breaks things.
Artix = Arch - SystemD + OpenRC (and a few more)
I support Red Hat for money, and do Fedora on this (Lenovo) laptop. There was an incompatibility in Fedora 39 on some package so I installed Fedora 38 instead. Besides that, I haven’t had any issues upgrading on my laptops for the last decade, nor on my media PC.
I don’t consider reverting to be much of a thing. Don’t get me wrong, I perform backups- especially just before a major update- but it’s quite reliable.
As an aside, I upgraded my media PC hardware and installed Ubuntu on it. It pretty much looks and tastes exactly like Fedora. Obviously there are differences (package management and system settings mostly) but the daily experience would be unnoticeable by, say, my wife.
Using KDE Neon. Uses Ubuntu LTS 22.04 (will go to 24.04 some time may/june) with the HWE kernel. Everything works out of the box.
Install using the FW guidelines for ubuntu and be done!
I’m running Arch Linux and loving it.
My machines all run ubuntu lts. Ubuntu 24.04 release in production (tomorrow?). I don’t care about anything flashy, but it’s best to go with the newest one that works stably for you as the newer repos make life easier over the next (years) you use it.
My 16 came a few days ago. I have not completed my install but I ran an overnight stress-test with the live-usb of 24.04 BETA and observed no problems.
So far I’ve tried the following distro’s:
Debian bookworm + Proxmox 8.1 + LMDE6
This combo works great out of the box, and makes it easy to move VM’s from my cloud server onto my laptop, and run them mobile.
It does however have one downside: I could not get the suspend/hibernate function to work properly.
Ubuntu 24.04
Seems to work great out of the box, but after some use I saw an occasional freeze, with no way to recover. And the only open app at that time was firefox… This problem occurred a few more times, and hence I’ve not used this distro for a while now.
EndeavorOS Gemini
This is now my go-to distro, everything seems to work out of the box, including suspend. A small problem was there when resuming from hibernate i had to reload the wifi module to reconnect. Installing the LTS kernel fixed that issue, and now i find that his is the os i boot the most.
Note that with all of these distro’s, i did take an additional step to manually install the latest linux firmware version.
I come from Arch and thought I’d try Fedora Silverblue, but I’m not entirely satisfied. There are a few nooks and crannies.
Maybe I’ll switch back to Arch after all?
Please try whichever distro you wish, however, in terms of “why isn’t this working”, we test and support against Fedora 40 and Ubuntu 24.04.
Been running and loving Arch on it. There was a shortlived fiasco with an update causing some issues with the trackpad, but those have been reverted for the time being.
I’ll give Fedora a few more days, otherwise I’ll probably go for Arch again.
I first tried Debian Stable, Then Fedora 40, back to Debian testing and now I’m a happy user of Majaro 23. I like it so far.
On Manjaro even boot splash of Frame.Work. very nice.
So I have to say that I feel like I’m not up to date all the time because I don’t get daily updates anymore 
With which distro?
Fedora 40 Silverblue