A fresh install of Fedora 35, not upgrading from 34, has proven to be an excellent choice for me. I’m using the KDE Spin and am very happy with everything. So far, everything I’ve tested works without issues – fingerprint reader, camera, microphone, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi 6 w/WPA3-SAE, trackpad, external monitor (HDMI).
I haven’t benchmarked battery life, because I mostly use the machine plugged in with a USB keyboard, Bluetooth mouse, and monitor. I have a Thunderbolt dock on the way that I expect to work based off of the thread in the forums.
I did install tuned for performance tuning, using the Desktop profile, and tlp for managing battery life.
At this point, I’ve settled on Qubes 4.1. I originally thought I would try that for a bit before switching to Arch. However, Qubes has been running so well that I see no reason to switch.
That said, I’m not using Framework’s WiFi card (never bought it so I don’t know if it’ll work), and I learned not to let it sleep
i am a person who is so into the notion of framework that i now think in terms of its marketing manager so I would rather argue to not work for every other linux distros even though I have records of multibooting 5 different OS. I guess a rock solid level support for Ubuntu and Fedora would be better for framework, where the responsibility of solving the too-many-linux-distro is on us (the gnu/linux guys). I don’t want to see my fav distro in framework, I rather want to see framework succeed with the linux community
Now that Slackware 15.0 has released, i’ve been using that for a few weeks. I was having an issue with a seagate USB 3.0 drive adapter, that has since gone away, and I think pretty much all the issues I was having are gone. I still wan’t to try something like Qubes, but its hard to uninstall when it works currently, and I use it daily.
When my Framework arrives Thursday, I plan to install Slackware in a dual-boot setup with Windows 10. First UEFI install, so expect to do some learning as I go.
Ubuntu’s really nice on the framework. I like the fit & finish–it just looks good. Fractional scaling out of the box is nice, too.
But I prefer Manjaro in every respect except a rather large one: it suddenly stopped recognizing that networking exists. Even the live installer. Which is a bummer, because Manjaro gave me better battery life, smoother video, better fingerprint integration, rolling releases…) But sort of hard to live without a network.
Ubuntu wins for the moment. Though I think I’ll try the disable_11ax networking fix suggested on the arch wiki.
UPDATE
Found a Decemberish Manjaro iso image on my hard drive, so I reinstalled over my original Manjaro partition. Network worked properly at install and after full upgrading. Not sure why the current download doesn’t work, but am not going to take the time to find out.
I just went the other direction after a challenging upgrade from 21.10 to 22.04 in Pop!_OS. Still working through getting hibernation working, Tests all seem to work fine, but trying to do a real hibernation results in a clean slate upon resuming. I’ve got a different ssd arriving and will do a new install on it to see if I can get it going.
Got it working, had to add a line to the openswap.conf file to have the btrfs subvolume mount properly.
Received my Framework DIY system from the August batch, and have installed Fedora 36 Xfce Spin on it. So far, most things seem to work well. I have seen a few glitches like some screen interference during videos, and some problems getting sound to work properly. However, those seem to be infrequent, and random so I can’t repeat any of them.
Hopefully, I will figure out how to get it all to be stable because I don’t like the default Gnome distribution.
Is anyone else running the Xfce spin? If so, I would appreciate any tips you might have.
I’ll likely install Xubuntu to the internal drive for my main OS install. Because I tend to be a chronic “tweaker” of Ubuntu/Xubuntu installs I’ll likely dual boot an Ubuntu server install, with a light WM like Openbox or I3 added, from the expansion storage drive as well if that is possible. My main use will be from the internal drive with a backup boot for when/if I mess up my main install.
