I’m still in doubt what OS i’m going for. I’m a big Ubuntu user and have been for the past 20 years or so. Not much of a terminal guy. Mostly just a user.
I could consider Windows, but that would not make me happy. |
SO what OS are you using? How is your experience. And how would it compare to Ubuntu?
Since Ubuntu is not a “supported“ Distro I wonder if it will work/work fine on the FW Desktop and how gaming performance is (using steam and minecraft)
uBlue user/dev here.
Propably going to put Bazzite or Aurora on the Desktop. Mostly because I will also use it to do Aurora maintaining.
Sorry, what is aurora maintaining?
I’m one of the maintainers 
So just general dev work on it, testing and local builds etc + Local LLM stuff and maybe little gaming
Try Bazzite. It’s the most stable distro out of the box that I’ve tried (for this hardware). I have not tried them all though. Anyway, for what you described, it seems perfect. Easy to avoid command line. It’s immutable-ish. It has the Baazar app catalog, which is so much better than other app catalogs/stores. You can choose GNOME if you want. The only mildly annoying thing is that for compatibility with some games, you need to enter their “gaming experience mode” to launch the game, which is basically Steam Big picture mode (but I think with a different presentation layer???).
(i only tested bazzite with the kde plasma desktop. your millage may vary with gnome)
Gnome is what the bazzite main dev uses himself, so it will work as fine. Of course there are some things that are different but basically both Gnome and KDE work very well on Bazzite.
If gaming is not your main thing you will be doing, then Aurora (KDE) or Bluefin are good choices and the selection depends which you like more KDE (more windows like) or Gnome (more macOS “like”).
I’m running EndeavourOS, and I’m really happy with it, arch distro so updates are same-day.
So far I’ve been able to run gpt-oss:120b on ollama with 20 token/s
I have another machine with a 3090 in it, the 120b model will not run on it, but for models that fit both, the framework desktop keeps pace, maginally slower than the 3090 and a LOT less heating under the desk.
Steam install is really seamless and there’s only one game that’s a bit buggy, everything else runs great.
I’ve installed the openSUSE Slowroll “slow”-rolling distro using KDE on a Framework 16 and both AMD versions of the Framework 13. Slowroll works very well on these models and I would expect it to also work very well on the other Framework models. Slowroll has very up to date kernels and drivers. It includes a number of drivers specific to Framework computers which are automatically installed. I’m not a gamer but I have a friend who plays and creates games and he uses Steam on openSUSE computers. If you install openSUSE Slowroll, I would recommend downloading the openSUSE Agama installer iso file and use that to do the install rather than the YaST installer. The Slowroll install iso file is updated once a month and the Agama installer is under active development and is updated frequently. The following URLs provide links to the Agama iso file as well as step by step instructions for creating a bootable USB flash drive and starting the installation of Slowroll or other openSUSE distros.
I’ve already mentioned it in the Linux forum, but I’m using Artix with it, and I haven’t encountered any issues at all with it. Artix is similar to Arch as far as what software it has, so Arch should work fairly well also. Since ChimeraOS is based on Arch as well, it will probably work fine with FD, but I haven’t tried it yet myself. ChimeraOS is basically the Arch version of Bazzite. (Not Chimera Linux, that one is completely different.)
I actually just moved my hard drive straight over from my other computer, then reinstalled the bootloader to get it working.
I don’t play Minecraft anymore, but Steam games I’ve tried work very well. Games that struggle on my Steamdeck work well on it. It also crushes my older Deskmini X300+5700G in pretty much every way.
I’ve dabbled with ROCm, but the stable ROCm release doesn’t have support for the GTX1151 (rdna 3.5) that the FD has, so I’ve been stuck just playing with Vulkan. I might try the dev version at some point.
Pretty much the exact same setup and its generally great! No issues with any packages or gaming.
I only had slight issues with Ollama: the screen turns off for a second when using bigger models, like the mentioned gpt-oss:120b. The Ollama logs report: HW Exception by GPU node-1 (Agent handle: 0x7fcab8693590) reason :GPU Hang. But that might be user error on my side. Or a driver issue and in that case the Arch based distro should get the fix pretty early.
Currently using NixOS and everything has been working well so far. No issues with Steam, games, or discord. LM-Studio seems to work as well. Haven’t tried comfyui or other AI tools yet.
If you like programming or the idea of operating system as code / infrastructure as code I’d recommend checking out NIxOS at some point. Probably in a virtual machine first though since its a bit different to most Linux distros.
according to this article:
Ubuntu is officially supported
Oh Thats great news.
Wondering how steam/minecraft gaming performance will do compared to my current 5 year ghost canyon nuc with a 2060
yaay for conflicting information pages.
Thanks for the heads up.
I am using openSUSE Tumbleweed. So far pretty much everything works fine. I did not manage to get rocm working for llama.cpp but Vulkan works well. I don’t know if it is really the most stable rolling release Distro but so far it is stable and there are snapshots right out of the box.
With scx it is also fairly easy to change to a multimedia oriented alternative cpu scheduler, which I did.
CachyOS with Cosmic DE as Desktop Environment. Very smooth, everything works perfectly.
Fedora 42, then enable the RPMFusion repositories for the Multimedia codecs, and Gnome extensions to get Gnome set up the way I like it (with dash to dock). Stable, everythings working the way I want it (apart from one weird issue where Grub does not recongnise my keyboard, its some weird layout). Steam OS brought along Proton and all my games work as expected (4k/60 for older titles, 1440p for newer ones).
I have Ubuntu on the Framework 12 and on my second partition on the 16. Think I’ll switch them to Fedora. Slightly prefer it.
The Min kernel is 6.11
Ubuntu 25.04 is on 6.14. And 25.10 will be on kernel 6.17, So at worst i would have sub par performance for a month?
That is for the kernel. There are other components (like mesa etc) but 25.10 propably has the newest stuff so should work fine (maybe).
