There are an enormous number of Linux distributions out there. Internally, we’ve been testing with Ubuntu and Fedora, but we want to check what everyone is interested in using.
As far as the rabbit hole is defined, I would say that by testing Ubuntu and Fedora you are doing your part. Pretty much everything is based on those two distros and so if those two work fine, pretty much everything else will.
The inverse is that there are so many differences across the board that being able to say all Linux distros work is just a waste of time and resources.
I’ve used Mint and still like it a lot. Currently using an Arch-based distro called Garuda Linux, that comes with a stylized KDE Plasma desktop. Looks fantastic and runs great.
@2disbetter I guess the real trick is to just make sure that all the necessary drivers and any necessary blobs (like for the mobo firmware or CPU microcode) are available, and to make sure that the various distro maintainers are at least aware of them. In theory framework shouldn’t really need to do anything themselves beyond that as each distros maintainers should handle making sure anything they need gets packaged appropriately.
Considering that I don’t think framework is using anything too unusual in their BOM, most of the drivers should already be handled barring anything that’s specific to their motherboard. As you say though, if there are deb and rpm bundles of all that stuff already, then the process of each distro adding support should be pretty trivial if not automatic simply by dent of being part of the upstream.
I’m going Fedora 34, because having Gnome 40 out of box is the best. Those touchpad gestures are basically essential imo for any ultra portable laptop.
I’ll be going with Rocky Linux (the community successor to CentOS, rip), with XFCE desktop. I’m hoping for the same multiple months of uptime I have on most of my other systems.