Hi everyone! I’m stuck in decision paralysis and could use some advice from the community.

I’ve been through several distros on my Framework 16" (AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, RX 7700S, 32GB RAM) and I keep running into situations where something’s missing with each one. I’m a GNOME user—that’s where I’m most productive and I don’t want to compromise on that.

The core issue: fw-fanctrl and framework-system integrate at the kernel level, which makes them a nightmare on immutable systems or with Secureboot enabled. That’s my biggest blocker.

Here’s what I’ve tried:

Arch Linux I genuinely feel at home with Arch, but I can’t quite explain why. The problem is the installation is tedious—especially dealing with Secureboot, fw-fanctrl, and framework-system dependencies. Setup gets old after a few rounds.

Fedora Silverblue Love the immutable concept—using Flatpak for (almost) everything is clean. I layer Librewolf on top, which works fine. But fw-fanctrl and framework-system? Kernel integration makes it incompatible with the immutable paradigm.

NixOS Genuinely impressive for reproducible system configs. The catch? Local update management is a nightmare. Hard to understand what’s coming in with updates and when. Terrible visibility.

Current setup: I use Distrobox heavily plus a Debian VM running VSCodium with my full dev environment. This stays.

Additional context: I’ve distro-hopped 2-3 times this year but I really want to settle down for a while. I’m also getting into local LLMs—running and testing models locally—so good GPU support and a stable environment for that would be a big plus.

The real question: Is there a distro that handles Framework’s kernel-level tools properly, has solid GNOME integration, plays well with local LLM work, AND won’t drive me crazy maintaining it long-term?