Am upgrading from thinkpad to framework 16 with amd. Looking for distro reccommendations.

Am upgrading from thinkpad to framework 16 with amd. Looking for distro reccommendations.

I would start looking at what's supported to begin with.

I did the whole distro chooser quiz but didnt help much.

FYI, it isn't as helpful as you would hope and hasn't been updated in quite a while. Don't be too much bothered with the result. But thanks for sharing some tidbits from the quiz as it helps the community to better help you!

avoid systemd

Are you sure you want this?

stable

Does this refer to unchanging (for long periods of time except for security updates)? Or, instead, for being less inclined to break after an update?

Is testing/unstable got wayland?

I don't recommend going for (Debian's/Devuan's) testing (branch) as it targets a peculiar niche that I fail to understand; e.g. it doesn't receive the security backports like Stable does nor does it receive them as soon as Unstable/Sid does. Unstable/Sid could work, but I would definitely setup (GRUB-)Btrfs + Timeshift/Snapper to retain my sanity.

are they reliable enough?

Depends on how reliable you want them to be. OOTB, their reliability definitely ain't great, though.

If so what do I go with.

Consider answering all questions found in this comment and we'll be better equipped to help you out with this.

Also hows the hardware comparability with framework i assume it wont be too bad to get set up.

Overall, it's pretty good; epecially so on the supported distros.

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Btw, you strike me as a (relatively) new user that doesn't seem to have a good understanding on Linux yet. Is this correct?

Fedora

1. A stable distro may not support that new Hardware
2. A distro without systemd may lack behind a lot, there are only a handful left, doing their thing
3. Did you try "immutable" distros? They are awesome if you want the benefits.

Void is an option that seems like a good fit, but you'd need to figure out if it supports your hardware well since the hardware is so new. Its a stable rolling release that uses runit which seems like a lot of peoples favorite alternative init system.

Fedora is maybe also worth considering but it uses systemd. Not sure if it has minimal packages, but I'm pretty sure fedora has official Framework support, including for the 16, and strikes a really good balance between having current packages and cutting edge hardware support, and being stable.

Also, sorry people are ignoring what you said you want and are telling you what you should want instead 😅 not helpful y'all.

My impression is that Debian unstable/testing is generally considered much more stable than arch, I assume that extends to devuan. But I think they also share packages, which means packages have been patched a ton, which it sounds like you don't want (I assume that's what you meant by "mininal packages")

I'm running Debian bookworm on my framework 16, I struggled a lot getting everything working properly so I'm not sure I would recommend it just yet

Have you looked at MX Linux? I think it doesn't use systemd. It's a pretty minimal install, too. NixOS can also likely be configured the way you want, though I don't know much about how to set up your config file to achieve your specific goals.

Another option might be to use Fedora CoreOS or Universal Blue uCore and just rolling your own downstream distro.

Edit: got carried away, as those last three options are all immutable.

I would go for a distro that has relatively recent/up to date packages, especially for Linux kernel and power-profiles-daemon, as these will work better with the CPU than packages from 6-12 months ago