We also sponsor Debian. We are distro-agnostic and pick our sponsorships largely based on what we see Framework Laptop owners using in our post-purchase surveys and community polls.

You need a minimal base OS to have the flexibility to build your own stuff on top of it, and you don't want to be at the behest of another corporation. That rules out Fedora, Suse, and Ubuntu. You also need it to be popular and have good hardware support. So the only two realistic options are Arch and Debian.

My guess is that Arch is easier to build on top of because they have a stronger culture of leaving packages as unmodified as possible relative to their upstream sources, whereas Debian maintainers seem to have the opposite culture. A Debian system has a lot of Debian-isms in it overall, whereas the Arch-isms tend to be more like generic sensible defaults rather than OS idosyncrasies.

> over Debian/Ubuntu

And over Fedora/RHEL. If I had to guess, it could be that new entrants find it easier to submit changes to Arch Linux packages [1]. ChromeOS also steered away from Debian-based distributions, choosing a Gentoo base.

[1] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages

I'd think it's because they're introducing updates to address issues w/ the hardware quickly and want a rolling-release distro so users can get the updates faster.

Personally I'd also think it would be a better engineering choice for Valve to base SteamOS on Fedora Atomic, as it supports the immutable OS paradigm a lot better imo. Especially now with progress in bootc/oci/ostree.

If only Arch supported Arm.

Debian (or Ubuntu) is a great base if you want to run one program on top of it.

Arch (or even Gentoo) is great if you want to do more detailed customizations of various things.

I use Linux for 20 years and I study programming for 10 years, bought 100 programming books, so a linux distribution is basically a programming language container. Slackware was for lisp. Now instead of kiss its simple ain’t easy with clojure. Debian is very tightly tied to perl with both communities bent on reproducibility. (Tho rust is replacing perl). Red hat and ibm is a Java shop. Centos is a scala platform at cern. Ubuntu and Python is a data science platform. Sure is a better Debian like ruby is a better Perl. And here we come to arch, when 10 years ago after a brief stunt with Perl basics I started learning c# the first thing I did is try to run the excercises on the raspberry pi. But because of some hard float soft float something they didn’t work. So I had to jailbreak the raspberry pi and run this new distro on it, the arch Linux. Where it just worked. You see ethics of ai and maybe like data science require the system to be fsf endorsed free system that’s what Debian gnu linux reason detre is. And Debian as Steve Jobs with Java were like against mono, you shall not pass. But for a gaming platform that’s a little bit different. Ex red had ceo now works at unity this mono fork. Ms bought blizzard, they want into this gaming thing badly. So that’s why steam os is arch now, less strict than Debian on the Libre side of things. The rest is history. :D

Me and a buddy have bought 3 Framework Desktops between us, they are just otherworldly awesome machines, and a good bit more expensive than the other Strix Halo models. I haven't been this excited about a computer since my i7 920 (Nehalem) in 2008, it's absolute alien technology.

I've also finally made the switch from a lifetime of Windows to Linux, and it just so happened to be CachyOS. The snappiness is just infinitely refreshing, to say nothing of not constantly submitting to Microsoft's dark patterns, so I'm super happy to see this news <3 Go Framework and AMD, go CachyOS and Linux!

Poll: Can Microsoft gargle my whole balls?

[A] Yes.

[B] Maybe later.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have the rest of the month to spend on vacation in my pyjamas coding ultra high precision N-body simulations and rendering them in 8K 60Hz entirely on CPU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz1Od_jkkFg) using my amazing new computer.

Framework is a not a huge organisation. This sponsorship consists of a few laptops and committing to a $250 monthly donation. There’s no contradiction here. CachyOS is also not a huge project.

I think drumming up interest in getting users to run Linux on frameworks is a way for them to go back to vendors and try to get them to fix issues like power consumption that bugs the hell out of users (looking at you AMD)

Our total set of 2025 sponsorships and donations is around $225k, which is a fraction of a percent of our 2025 revenue. We would like to and plan to increase the funding we allocate to open source projects that our products and customers depend on in 2026. Our financials are healthy, and we see this as a good investment.

I think they are doing quite well, the CEO mentioned in a town hall video somewhere that they have strongest growth in the business segment where there are a lot of buyers who like the idea of a computer that their IT department can repair.

I also don't think these project sponsorships cost a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. I imagine they are basically part of the marketing budget.

When one of your main customer targets is Linux users, spending 5 figures on sponsoring a Linux project might be more effective than spending 5 figures on ad impressions.

> Framework has not only provided us with a Framework Laptop 16 to help us optimize our kernel and packages on modern hardware, but they have also committed to a $250 monthly donation.

I'm gonna guess a laptop and a few thousand dollars (over years) isn't exactly breaking the bank.

They've raised about $45M in venture capital to date. I don't think they are profitable yet, but they at least have other people's money to throw around for now.

Who cares if they're profitable? They want to push a right-wing agenda and no amount of silly things such as 'financial sense' will stop them.

When you have a techbro Vivek Ramaswamy as your head whose greatest desire is to be recognized as a honorary white by other techbros, nothing can ever stand in your way.

They did look into putting a trackpoint in there, but there wasn't enough depth in the keyboard cover to support it. Making it work would take re-doing the whole bottom shell (apparently).

I'm tempted to make a thicker bezel so the screen won't close all the way anymore. Pick up the room for a trackpoint by going wedge shaped! (edit, obvious downside: the screen would be a lot weaker when closed)

I recommend installing proton-catchyos for faster shader compilation as well, but you might run into stability issues if you are on an unstable overclock due to how hard it is able to push the cpu with intrinsics.

Normal stress-ng I barely see 85 degrees while I saw shader compilation clock in 105c.

How does it do with scaling? That's been one of my main pain points with different Linux distros on my Framework (well, that, the trackpad scroll speed, and battery life/suspension)

It completely blew up for me as well (unbootable) during an update that included the linux-firmware package split from earlier this year. Fortunately this occurred during a testing period in a VM.

Was also looking to see if that was possible recently. Wonder if either party would consider supporting that officially?

I'm enjoying CachyOS so far. I've been running it for a while without issue.

If it was just a few days ago, maybe they had already added the logo but hadn't posted the announcement yet?

I did _exactly_ this 3 days ago after I hit a random keyboard chord on accident and brought up CoPilot (which I don't recall installing). I had held on to Windows for gaming just because I didn't want to fuss with Linux, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back. Instantly installed CachyOS onto a USB stick and formatted my entire drive.

I use KDE Plasma and it worked just fine. In fact all of my games (including Arc Raiders) are working just fine on Proton 10, maybe running slightly worse. The only issue I've run into is getting battle.net working through Lutris; I ended up manually installing it through Proton 10 on Steam and it worked just fine. Wish I made the switch earlier.

I've been using CachyOS with Plasma desktop for a long time now. Including my gaming PC. Zero problems. But I don't play any online games.

You'd probably want to use an X11-based DE like Cinnamon instead, many games still don't play well with wayland.

I love KDE, but it's too buggy for me. About once a day the bottom dock would just disappear. I really wish they'd focus a little more on stability.

I use Sway on CachyOS, and to me it's the perfect DE. Being able to switch between windows in under a quarter of a second indispensable once you've experienced it.