Mostly web surf, listen to music, take notes, do file organization, etc. I have my Steam Deck for gaming, and I’d probably use web-based apps for the engineering work I do before loading anything onto my laptop
But I may also want to download things like FreeCAD and other tools in the future
Any linux OS with a Desktop Environment will do that for you. If it’s a newer laptop you should probably go with Fedora and pick KDE Plasma desktop. Fedora has really good driver support for newer hardware and seems to work well with what framework laptops ship with.
Linux Mint is also good however try to stay away from snaps starting out as they can cause confusing behavior due to how they’re implemented. A recent problem was Firefox from the snap store not working over VNC.
What are you intending to do with your laptop?
Mostly web surf, listen to music, take notes, do file organization, etc. I have my Steam Deck for gaming, and I’d probably use web-based apps for the engineering work I do before loading anything onto my laptop
But I may also want to download things like FreeCAD and other tools in the future
Any linux OS with a Desktop Environment will do that for you. If it’s a newer laptop you should probably go with Fedora and pick KDE Plasma desktop. Fedora has really good driver support for newer hardware and seems to work well with what framework laptops ship with.
https://fedoraproject.org/en/workstation/download
Linux Mint is also good however try to stay away from snaps starting out as they can cause confusing behavior due to how they’re implemented. A recent problem was Firefox from the snap store not working over VNC.
https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
To be honest your best bet would be to search linux distros in the framework forums and see what they’re experiencing.
https://community.frame.work/
Good luck with your new laptop. If you’re doing CAD go for AMD as that seems to work better for GPU intensive workloads on Linux.
Appreciate the tips! Yeah I think the forums will probably be my best bet since they’re focused on application -specific solutions.
I think I’ll grab an AMD CPU with Fedora/KDE Plasma and go from there.