The software debate

[Techie_Zeddie]

Windows 11 Pro
Fedora 39
Steam
CPU-Z
CPU-X
CoreTemp
htop
neofetch
xmrig
lm-sensors

Battle.net

Discord
Thincast
MAME
Firefox
LibreOffice
Audacity
OBS
VLC

[Curtis_Carter]

Coming from Linux so extra choice means a few extra choices:

EndeavourOS- basically ArchLinux but with a nice installer and some utilities
Windows 11 - I’ll probably dual boot for dev/testing, but I may just throw windows on my old laptop or and use it there (can’t do a VM because I maintain the multipass chocolatey installer which does not like being in a guest Windows OS)
KDE - Cinnamon is the only other Desktop Environment that felt as featured/polished as Windows does but KDE’s Android integration among other nice features drew me in
Jetbrains Software - Toolbox, Rider, RustRover, Webstorm and all the tools those are bundled with
VSCode - because I use it at work and I’m used to the shortcuts otherwise I might try Fleet
Firefox, Chrome and Vivaldi browsers - I test in Chrome/Firefox but I like Vivaldi
Steam, Heroic, and Lutris for games
Blender/Godot - Making Games/modeling is a new hobby for me, nothing meaningful has been made lol
PrusaSlicer - Got a 3D printer, occasionally use it for something
NuGetDefense - Shameless plug

[Philam]

If I may, does any good fan control software exist for laptops (i.e. one that really allows you full control)? I know the much celebrated fan control software recommended by many youtubers for example, but I think it is mainly for desktops (tried to install it recently on my XPS 15 and as expected I was only allowed to mess with two out of three fans of my EGPU graphics card). Thanks for any suggestions. My XPS 15 is slowly dying and getting increasingly loud (despite cleaning)…

Home - Fan Control

[Philam]

@Adrian_Joachim

That is indeed nice, intel also made their up-sampling thing cross platform. Don’t think that’s really comparable to xtu though.

I used to own Razer laptops a lot and loved them, and Razer has a system tuning software compatible with any laptop. So I somehow didn’t make the connection that other system softwares like XTU are specific to manufacturers. Given they are chip manufactures I understand.

[Cameron_Bosch]

@Curtis_Carter

Coming from Linux so extra choice means a few extra choices:

EndeavourOS- basically ArchLinux but with a nice installer and some utilities
Windows 11 - I’ll probably dual boot for dev/testing, but I may just throw windows on my old laptop or and use it there (can’t do a VM because I maintain the multipass chocolatey installer which does not like being in a guest Windows OS)
KDE - Cinnamon is the only other Desktop Environment that felt as featured/polished as Windows does but KDE’s Android integration among other nice features drew me in
Jetbrains Software - Toolbox, Rider, RustRover, Webstorm and all the tools those are bundled with
VSCode - because I use it at work and I’m used to the shortcuts otherwise I might try Fleet
Firefox, Chrome and Vivaldi browsers - I test in Chrome/Firefox but I like Vivaldi
Steam, Heroic, and Lutris for games
Blender/Godot - Making Games/modeling is a new hobby for me, nothing meaningful has been made lol
PrusaSlicer - Got a 3D printer, occasionally use it for something
NuGetDefense - Shameless plug

Nice! I know EndeavourOS (and pretty much every Arch based distro) isn’t offically supported, but given I know enough about Linux to use Arch (and install it without archinstall), I think I’d be fine.

I’d probably keep a Fedora 40 KDE Spin partition so that if Framework asks for an officially supported distro if I have any problems, I would be able to test if the problem persists on Fedora (which is officially supported) (and no, I’d rather not use GNOME because the workflow really doesn’t agree with mine).

This will probably be my first laptop (and even my first computer in general) to not have Windows installed at all, because every previous laptop and desktop I had had Windows preinstalled and I needed it for OEM tools. (And no Linux-first OEM had proper hardware for my use cases, so Windows-first with Linux slapped on was the best choice for me. )

[Cameron_Bosch]

For me, my immediate software list would be as follows:

• EndeavourOS KDE Plasma (my main and unsupported by Framework distro, because I’ve found rolling release distros more stable than point release distros, with the exception of Manjaro, of course)
• Fedora KDE Spin (for an distro offically supported by Framework in case we would need to test if something’s wrong)
• LibreOffice
• Discord
• Mailspring (it works better than Thunderbird in my experience)
• Tokodon
• Vivaldi
• OBS Studio
• VLC
• Mixxx (for DJing)
• Bottles (for running Ableton Live with Wine and other Windows apps that I can’t replace)
• btop
• htop
• neofetch
• Wike
• A video editor TBD (there isn’t one on Linux that meets my needs unfortunately, so I may have to keep looking for one that works on Linux and with AMD Mesa)
• Mission Center
• Resources
• Flatseal and flatpak-kcm (KDE Plasma’s flatpak permission manager built into system settings once installed)
• Neovim (I have to try it out because I need a new code editor)
• Steam (because of course I like to play PC games and I hate consoles)
• Heroic (for non-steam games)
• Elisa (KDE’s audio player, which I like)
• Audacity
• Cavalier (an CAVA audio waveform player)
• Okular
• Freetube

And probably will be installed more over time.

I would try to install all of the GUI apps via Flatpak whenever possible.

[Philam]

@Semptum

I’m guessing it has something to do with the FW16 being an AMD only machine in the first iteration…

Yeah, question is general and not only for first generation, if that helps ;). I hope noone here is complaining about this on an Intel FW13…

[Philam]

@ParticleCannon

erm… who wants to tell him?

Eh… so what is your point? Thread is completely valid and please note this is not a thread about first iteration of FW16 only. It is called “software debate” - software includes Intel XTU. Do people like to use it, or go for another one? Unless you really don’t like Intel XTU?

Or do you have information that FW16 will be forever AMD based? That would be cool. Please advise.

I changed it in the introduction, in case it was really not clear ;).

[Adrian_Joachim]

@Philam

Eh… so what is your point? Thread is completely valid and please note this is not a thread about first iteration of FW16 only. It is called “software debate” - software includes Intel XTU. Do people like to use it, or go for another one? Unless you really don’t like Intel XTU?

Don’t read too much into it, it’s just a light joke because running xtu on an amd system is relatively silly.

[Philam]

@Adrian_Joachim

on an amd system

Of course. But this is a forum. If you can’t ask silly questions, then when can you learn? When I started here it was you who informed me about oculink - before that I thought it was a cable for VR headsets. ;).

Just trying to make some threads where people are free to discuss what they want - without exceptions made by other users.

PS: I still don’t understand how people could categorise the world most upgrade focused laptop as “an amd system” just because the company starts with amd in the first iteration (I think a bit silly) but in any case, I guess my main point is that please, let people discuss intel here as well if they choose to.

[Pietro_Mele]

My configuration for my due to arrive FW16:

• Artix Linux (an exact copy of Arch, without SystemD). Nice not to have to format the SSD to remove an unwanted OS.
• LLVM C++ compiler (https://llvm.org).
• Rust compiler.
• KDE.
• SourceTrail (not developed anymore, but still a great product, similar to Doxygen).

[Cameron_Bosch]

@Pietro_Mele

Nice not to have to format the SSD to remove an unwanted OS.

Oh you don’t know half of my experience! Windows 11 has become so horrible even compared to Windows 10, that I dumped Windows entirely upon 11’s release and went straight to Linux full-time, eventually ending up on my current main OS EndeavourOS! Windows 11 copied KDE Plasma, no doubt about it.

[Pietro_Mele]

@Cameron_Bosch - I may have anticipated you. The last version of Windows I installed on my own computers was NT4 (1996). Then I switched to RedHat Linux 4. So, I had been conservative, I kept the same version number :')

[Philam]

Some people here apparently don’t know FW16 will have Intel CPUs, so sharing a survey here which makes it quite clear it’s not meant for AMD only… XD.

Just to make sure…

[Poll] CPU and GPU combinations

poll We’ll be sharing more details around the specs of Framework Laptop 16 when we open pre-orders, but we were interested in seeing what the community’s preferences are around CPUs and GPUs. There are (basically) two CPU and three GPU makers currently operating in the notebook market, which leads to six possible combinations. Let us know which combination you want most. The poll is in alphabetical order.

[BigT]

I don’t have a ton of software that I need/use on a regular basis, but I have a few givens:

OS of choice used to be Windows, but lately I’m trying to switch fully to Linux. On the FW 16, I was hoping to do a little video editing on it and the program I use doesn’t have a Linux version, so that’s a bummer. We’ll see. I may have to use Windows just for the video editor. If I decide not to use it for video editing, I’ll go with Fedora 39. For the rest of the software, I’ll assume Linux.

Word processor, typically LibreOffice Writer these days. Used to use Wordperfect (many years ago). Used Word for a short time, but I got annoyed at some of the changes/updates.

Gimp for some light photo editing.

Darktable for processing some RAW photos.

Fedora 39 GNOME has a good screenshot/snip tool, so I shouldn’t have to get one of those.

Steam. Not always a given on a laptop, but on the 16, I’ll definitely be trying some games, even if that’s not my main use.

Beyond that, everything else is kind of “as needed.” Maybe Audacity. Maybe OBS. Just depends. Beyond word processing and photo/video editing (and games, obviously), most stuff I need a laptop for is either web-based (so it’s all done in browser) or functionality built into or otherwise included in most operating systems, so it doesn’t require extra software.

[Zeppelins_Forever]

Planning to dual boot Fedora 39 (KDE) and Windows 10 Enterprise IoT LTSC. I will only upgrade to Win11 once its IoT LTSC iteration comes out

Fedora software (aside from KDE defaults):

• VLC
• OBS
• LibreWolf
• Ungoogled Chromium
• Wine
• WireShark
• VSCodium
• Kdenlive (might eventually learn DaVinci)
• Factorio (we’re counting games in the software list, right?)
• Audacity
• LocalSend
• QEMU
• neofetch
• Logseq Desktop
• Steam
• Session
• Jami
• OpenVPN
• KeePassXC
• GIMP
• GitHub Desktop
• Okular
• ProtonVPN
• qBittorrent
• Discord
• HexChat
• ytarchive, yt-dlp, and streamlink

Windows 10 software:

• Voidtools Everything (highly recommend this, especially their 1.5a version)
• W10Privacy
• O&OShutUp10
• WindowsSpyBlocker
• VLC (again)
• Windows PowerToys
• Adobe Photoshop
• Steam (again)
• Mostly games and apps that are a pain to run on Linux. Wine works great, except when it doesn’t.

[lane_ftw]

Can’t believe no one has mentioned hwinfo64.
A few notable utils
notepad++
MS terminal
localsend

[Vivian]

OS: Manjaro KDE(including pre bundled software)

Software:
Firefox(pre bundled)
KDE connect
Krita
Inkscape
Lightburn
Prusa Slicer
ADB Platform tools

Themes:
Colloid-Dark-Nord

[Jorg_Mertin]

@BigT

On the FW 16, I was hoping to do a little video editing on it and the program I use doesn’t have a Linux version, so that’s a bummer. We’ll see. I may have to use Windows just for the video editor. If I decide not to use it for video editing, I’ll go with Fedora 39. For the rest of the software, I’ll assume Linux.

Using KdenLive for all Viceo éditing I do. (RC Model airplanes and Diving stuff).

[Philam]

Seems VLC is really the player to go for

Glad to see the thread is going despite some people at the beginning not understanding the topic - which I guess is normal for an online forum.