Hello,
I just purchased an AMD framework 13 and while I wait (im)patiently for it to arrive, I was wondering what Linux distros people here are using.
I’ve only ever use Ubuntu on desktop, but I think I’m ready to move away from it now, which I guess leaves fedora and mint as officially supported distros.
What have you tried? What are your experiences?
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.