I’ve been looking at frameworks for a while and was considering pitching them at work, but it seems linux isn’t officially supported(only community supported) sadly for that kind of environment it’s unrealistic to depend on community support. As such I was wondering, does anyone know if there’s any plans for frameowork to install+support any linux flavour out of the box officially?
Thanks again for any that looked at this
It’s not the exact same, but you could take out a support contract with one of the enterprise-y distros (IIRC both Canonical and Red Hat offer support contracts).
Ubuntu - We have an excellent working relationship with Ubuntu and do recommend them. LTS is as always, the most vetted however 22.10 also works great.
Fedora - We have an excellent working relationship with Fedora. Recommending 37 right now as that is the version I’ve been able to support coming into this job.
The two distros above are where our testing happens the most.
Now, I should be ultimately clear - because we don’t provide actual distro images ourselves, we provide support for all distros that we have tested. The upcoming Linux Mint release is being vetted by me today for example.
As a general rule, anything current that is Ubuntu/Fedora based is going to be a good time (Pop OS, Ubuntu derivatives, Fedora derivatives). I certify distro releases, because a lot happens from one release to another and the kernel updates in between. 
Other distros will get full community support from myself and others here as well. So if you have a problem with say, XYZ distro, you are able to open a forum query here or a ticket for assistance.
I come from a support space in a previous job where we supported Pop OS, Ubuntu and “did our best” with every other distro. My goal here is to be similar, but offer more official support by including Fedora and Linux Mint.
I realize and accept some may read this as “we only support X” which is not true, we only are able to certify exhaustive testing on X,Y and Z."
Tltr, we support anything you throw our direction, but for enterprise environments I recommend Ubuntu LTS or Fedora 37 (or current going forward).
I don’t know if you found this page yet, but as @Matt_Hartley said, Framework does officially support multiple distros to be used on the laptop, though they do not currently have any infrastructure to preinstall any OS other than Windows. That being said, they also don’t really have full support for large volume sales yet (as far as I know), so you would have to contact the official support team about setting up an order like that. There is a chance they may be willing to work with you to preinstall a linux image on the laptop, but it’s more likely that you would have to do the installations yourself.
Just to update this for the new year. We’re going to be focusing very heavy on Ubuntu and Fedora support in 2023. All other distros will receive my best efforts / community support.
I will also be able to help with Void Linux once my Framework arrived.
This distribution has no graphical installer and uses runit instead of systemd.
XBPS, the package manager, is written from scratch and has a good performance.
The real advantage of Void lies in it’s simplicity: Packages are kept minimal, yet usable. There is only one repository for the packages and both the community and distro maintainers update it regulary. It supports a lot of ARCHs with more to come. You can even use musl instead of glibc if you want to.
I will also tinker around with different Linux Distribution images via ventoy, so that I might be able to check how Framework works on different distributions and versions.
I believe officially focusing on Ubuntu is a good idea though, at least for the time being.
Fantastic! I dig runit, so I look forward to colabing on this.
I am wanting to change my distro from Ubuntu 24.04 to Void. I have the Framework Laptop 16 with Ryzen™ 9 7940HS. The recommended minimum architecture requirements of Void are:
| Architecture | CPU | RAM | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| x86_64-glibc | x86_64 | 96MB | 700MB |
| x86_64-musl | x86_64 | 96MB | 600MB |
| i686-glibc | Pentium 4 (SSE2) | 96MB | 700MB |
How do I find what the architecture is in my laptop? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Anachron, did you install Void on your Framework laptop 13? Wondering how that went and looking for any advice.
Void works perfectly on the 12th gen Framework 13.
You are on x86_64, I would suggest to use the glibc variant.
If you need help, go on the #voidlinux irc channel on libera.
Hi, Anachron.
Apologies if this should now be posted in a different place. I am new to using forums.
Thank you for the feedback and suggestion on variants for Void. I have yet to be successful with installing Void so I tried to get to the #voidlinux irc channel on libera. I am receiving the message below when trying to connect to IRC via gamja irc client.
Closing Link: static-198-54-131-188.cust.tzulo.com (SASL authentication to a NickServ account with a verified email address is required to connect from your current network. Please see Using SASL | Libera Chat for configuration assistance.)
I haven’t used libera before. Reading through the libera.chat guides isn’t helping. How do I get to the channel?
Hello and sorry, I thought maybe you were already familiar with IRC.
You could use https://web.libera.chat/ and type in #voidlinux and get started as a guest first.
Take care!
Hi.
I tried that and am still getting the message:
Closing Link: static-198-54-131-188.cust.tzulo.com (SASL authentication to a NickServ account with a verified email address is required to connect from your current network. Please see Using SASL | Libera Chat for configuration assistance.)
and not getting logged in. Any suggestions on how to do that?