Hey all,
So my fw13 amd is due to arrive soon, however I’m not sure if I should go Ubuntu or Fedora?
I just want a stable out of the box experience, but works with the finger print reader, and ideally stuff like TPM and secure boot.
The usage will mostly be general web browsing and some light gaming via steam, not too much else.
I suspect they are both as well supported in terms of the framework, just not sure if one is more stable than the other.
TIA
I ran Fedora for a while and i was very impressed how good it worked, i have not tested ubuntu. I’am not a fan of the snap thing, although this might be better now. My experience is from a couple of years back.
I’ve ran both Ubuntu and Fedora on my FW13 AMD. Both worked fine out of the box with TPM and secure boot. I don’t use the fingerprint reader so I can’t speak to that. I like Fedora better than Ubuntu but that’s a matter of personal preference, not because of any instability or lack of support for either distro.
Stable is relative. Fedora often ships newer software and more or less the direct upstream software and updates faster, so there’s a slightly higher change of stuff breaking, but fixes usually appear fast.
On the other hand Ubuntu often ships outdated or modified software, so if something is broken, it’s often taking longer for something to be fixed and you might get weird issues because Ubuntu pre-installs some extensions or modifies the default theme and so on.
Both should work well out of the box, fingerprint reader included. If your Framework is older you may need to install a firmware update, though.
Howdy!
Traditionally I’ve always been a fan of Ubuntu, but you mentioned this is an AMD system and in recent times I’ve gravitated more toward Fedora on systems with AMD processors. I would recommend Fedora 41, then Ubuntu 24.04.2, then Ubuntu 24.10 in that order. Ubuntu 24.04 will be a better choice than 24.10 because around August you should get kernel 6.14 if everything continues along the currently planned release schedule. The primary reason my first choice is Fedora is that Fedora’s more rapid pace of updates tends to result in amdgpu specific fixes trickling down to the users a little bit faster.
Hope this helps you make a choice that’s suited to your needs.
Does kernel 6.14 have some notable amdgpu-specific fixes/improvements?
I’d be happy to clarify. Kernels 6.12 and 6.13 had quite a number of fixes added. Currently Ubuntu 24.04.2 is on 6.11, and they will be skipping those two versions.
To try to avoid getting too bogged down in the technical explanations about why they’re skipping those versions, Ubuntu releases tend to be very strict in what versions of software they use. Ubuntu is based on Debian which follows a release schedule based on the idea of stability meaning that system does not change much. The idea there is to minimize maintenance windows and prioritizing consistency for servers or enterprise desktops. Generally each release of Ubuntu stays on a single kernel version. For LTS this means a new kernel is made available in the form of the HWE kernel roughly every six months.
Please let me know if I can explain this better or in more detail.
That makes sense, thanks. I’m currently using a Fedora-based distro (specifically Secureblue, a bootable container image based on Fedora Silverblue with additional security hardening) so I’m on kernel 6.13 now. Part of the reason I switched from Ubuntu is exactly the issue you brought up about Fedora being on a faster update cycle so fixes are available sooner (and so far 6.13 does seem to have fixed some amdgpu issues I was running into before).