cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21664063

Linux Mint and Framework Laptops Join Forces

The October 2024 edition of Linux Mint’s Monthly News brings exciting updates, including a significant announcement about collaboration with Framework Laptops, having potential to advance Mint’s compatibility with hardware designed with flexibility, repairability, and sustainability in mind.

For those unfamiliar, unlike most traditional laptops, which are often difficult or impossible to repair or upgrade, Framework laptops are built to be user-friendly, making it easy to replace or upgrade components. This modular approach extends the laptop’s lifespan and promotes sustainability by reducing e-waste.

  • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
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    17 days ago

    Great news! My only issue is that Clem and team keep on taking up more and more tasks. Of course there’s maintaining both Linux Mint and LMDE, the entire Cinnamon desktop, and their own applications, but there are also all the deb programs they have to package now that Ubuntu is moving further towards snaps, and there’s also the whole new Clutter framework, and the maintaining of GTK3 programs so they don’t have to deal with libadwaita, and then there’s the Cinnamon UI refresh, the Wayland transition, and probably some other things I can’t even think of right now, and they are working on all of that.

    And now they’re working on the best compatibility with Framework laptops? I’m just worried that they might be taking too much work for themselves.

    • flyingjake
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      17 days ago

      Framework 17 owner here, they have also partnered with Ubuntu and Fedora as official distros, this is just expanding the ecosystem. They also have a robust and well supported set of communities for other distros and often have their support engineers participate there.

    • ShortN0te@lemmy.ml
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      16 days ago

      It is not about the drivers, framework has most likely not the capability to develop drivers for their Laptops, it is the manufacturer’s job. All framework can do is selecting parts that are already supported by the kernel. Also a driver can take several years until it actually gets into a not rolling release distro like Ubuntu or mint since they do not use the newest kernel.

      This collab is more about making sure, that when you install those distros everything works out of the box which is not a given, depending on the compile flags for the kernel they used or what packages are coming installed by default.

    • The Hobbyist@lemmy.zipOP
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      17 days ago

      They do mention compatibility a lot, if it’s hardware, I agree with you. But perhaps they mean something else?

  • xylogx@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    I run Mint on my framework 13 AMD laptop. Works great out of the box. Even the fingerprint reader works without any issues.

    • Hanrahan@slrpnk.net
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      14 days ago

      How are you finding the 13? I keep flip flopping between the 13 and the 16 and then do nothing.