Framework Laptop Community

Mint is my goto for newer Linux users, and users that want something that #justworks.

I use Mint on all my personal laptops with the default Cinnamon desktop environment and it's always incredibly stable.

Mint just announced a few weeks ago that they are partnering officially with the Framework team to make sure compatibility is top notch, so the already good compatibility will become even better over the coming months and years.

The only real downside with Mint, and specifically Cinnamon, is that it looks a little dated. You can get it looking pretty modern and clean, but it doesn't look nearly as modern and sleek as KDE Plasma or Cosmic. It doesn't look bad though, and honestly, when I need to just get work done, I don't need it looking ultra sexy-sleek.

Mint personally didn't stick with me, and I settled on Kubuntu. I felt like troubleshooting ended up being a lot more opaque and frustrating on mint than on kubuntu, and I felt like there were a lot of little accessibility features that were missing on mint.

Kubuntu (KDE in general) is more overwhelming at first, but I feel like it's much more of a "set it and forget it" experience

I would recommend you Aurora or Bluefin. They're both the same, but one is KDE, and the other is Gnome.

They are pretty much indestructible, ultra-low maintenence (staged automatic updates, etc.), different branches, great quality of life tweaks and more included.

It's a bit similar to how Android works, but powered by a common PC.

With the great touchpad both KDE and Gnome would shine due to their smooth gestures they offer.

Slightly off topic, but whatever distro you choose you probably want to use the kernel parameter amdgpu.abmlevel=0 because without it the display gets super washed out and low contrast when the laptop is in power saving mode which drove me insane until I figured out that parameter.

Mint if you are coming from Windows.

Pop!_OS if you are coming from Mac.

Pop!_OS on a Thinkpad has been my daily driver for five years now. Not a single problem, ever. Rock solid.

I've been using Fedora KDE spin on my Framework 16 and it absolutely rocks! 😁

This may be of interest to you. I run Debian testing on mine.

I've used UbuntuDDE and Manjaro, and they both ran fine, although that was back on my Intel mainboard. Now, on my AMD mainboard, I currently use ZorinOS and my roommate uses Kubuntu on his. I didn't need to switch, I just wanted to check out Zorin again. You used to have to run a script to install an OEM kernel but I think as of some recent updates that's no longer necessary. My only negative is the battery drains a lot in sleep mode, so it's better to shut down.

I have run Fedora and NixOS on my framework. Both run well, Fedora is equal/close equal to Ubuntu in ease of use.

I'm on CachyOS and it has been pretty rock solid. Was also on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for a while and that also worked well.

I like CachyOS as the performance difference was actually noticeable and there are a couple things on the AUR that I prefer to not be installed as flatpaks.

Ive been using Gnome with Fedora ever since I switched to Linux. So far it has been smooth sailing. I would say the choice of distro doesn't matter that much, both Mint and Fedora are very easy to use. Just pick one with the Desktop Environment you like the most. If you are not sure, test them on a Virtual Machine.

After Ubuntu for many years I switched to Arch because they packaged a number of things I wanted that Ubuntu did not.

If you are happy with Ubuntu stick with that. I have friends and family that use it and it’s fine.

I smoothly run openSUSE Tumbleweed on my Intel framework 13. I can recommend checking it out.

NixOS

I run Garuda on my 16 and my desktop PC.

It's basically a KDE-centric Arch build but with some quality of life tools and XTREME GAMER default theming, plus you're not legally required to say you're using Arch all the time.

No complaints so far. Sure, you're expected to update all packages on your computer about once per day but I find that process to be fairly smooth. You can always configure your desktop to stop looking like a bordello for dragons and I rather like how garuda-update automates some of the housekeeping involved with the package manager.

If I had to pick a different distro I'd probably try out something immutable but so far I have no intention to switch.

I'm very happily using Kubuntu on mine.

Relevant :)

I think the real question is what do you want to learn?

If you want to learn Linux for a job I would recommend Fedora. The packages are up there with Arch in terms of being close to latest. SELinux, a security architecture, is standard in the RHEL ecosystem (Fedora is the testing distro for Red Hat Enterprise Linux). DNF gets a lot of flak for being slow but with the recent update to DNF5 in Fedora 41 there are noticeable improvements.

If you want to learn what's going on under the hood in traditional Linux, use Arch.

If you want guard rails so you don't break things, use an immutable distro like Bluefin.

Heck, distro hop for a bit so you learn how to answer this question for yourself :) -- you can check out separate home partitions so you can change distros, or install multiple, without getting rid of all of your settings / data. Use nix package manager and home-manager so you can reproduce your configs when you distro hop.

Don't think too hard about the DE. You can always switch to a new one. I generally keep 2-3 DEs on my system at a time so I can change it up at the login screen if the mood strikes. It takes all of 15 min to get set up for an absolute newbie.