When I install Linux for friends and family the only distro I use anymore is Fedora. I have used just about every major distro, and Fedora is the only one that has “just worked” on every computer I have tried it on.

Love them, or hate them, Red Hat is by far the single biggest company in the Linux community, and their Red Hat Enterprise Linux is renowned for being stable, performant, and very well supported. Fedora is where most of the updates that make their way into RHEL are initially available, so with Fedora you get a cutting edge distro with the backing and resources of a massive corporation that employs many of the top Linux-desktop contributors.

If you want a distro that “just works” I strongly recommend you give Fedora a try.

DietPi! It’s one the most resource efficient distros that is easy to set up. It’s ideal for single board computers and virtual machines, so I use it as a low-overhead Docker host on my Raspberry Pis. The dietpi-software tool installs optimized versions of most software you might use for SBC projects, but if it doesn’t have what you’re looking for, you can also use APT to install packages from the Debian ARM/ Raspbian repos.

I highly recommend Framework laptops for Linux. I have not used the Framework 16, but I can attest that Linux support for the Framework 13 (intel 11th & 12th gen) is excellent. I have used Fedora on the Intel 11th gen and Intel 12th gen, everything worked immediately on a fresh install without any workarounds or issues. Other distros might require a few package installs, but Fedora, Ubuntu, and Ubuntu derivatives should work out-of-the-box without any additional configuration. The Arch Wiki article for the Framework covers pretty much everything you might need to know to have an optimized Linux experience with any distro.

Aside from Framework’s excellent Linux support, I really have to stress how cool and unique it is as a laptop for developers and tinkerers. This thing is literally designed to be opened up, repaired, and modded. All of the internal components are clearly labeled and easily accessible, there’s even a little spot inside the laptop chassis just for spare screws in case a screw ever gets lost! Another awesome obscure feature of this laptop is the ability to use a Storage Expansion Card for dual booting. I just plug in the expansion card to boot into Windows, then unplug it and I’m back in Linux. It is absolute bliss compared to Windows and Linux sharing a bootloader.

I know I’m rambling, but I really could keep going on and on about Frameworks. They truly are unlike any other laptop, in all the right ways.

I avoid Ubuntu because Canonical has a history of going their own way alone rather than collaborating on universal standards. For instance, when the X devs decided the successor to X11 needed to be a complete redesign from scratch companies like RedHat, Collabora, Intel, Google, Samsung, and more collaborated to build Wayland. However, Canonical announced Mir, and they went their own way alone.

When Gnome3 came out it was very controversial and this spawned alternatives such as Cinnamin, MATE, and Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. Unity was the only Linux desktop, before or since, to include sponsored bloatware apps installed by default, and it also sold user search history to advertisers.

Then, there’s snap. While Flatpak matured and becoame the defacto standard distro-agnostic package system, Canonical once again went their own way alone by creating snap.

I’m not an expert on Ubuntu or the Linux community, I’ve just been around long enough to see Canonical stir up controversy over and over by going left when everyone else goes right, failing after a few years, and wasting thousands of worker hours in the process.