We've been testing with Ubuntu 21.04 and Fedora 34. We'll be releasing guides around both of these soon and other distros in the future. On Fedora 34 respins that are going live soon, everything works out of the box, including the fingerprint reader. On Ubuntu 21.04, everything works out of the box except the fingerprint reader, which requires manually upgrading libfprint.
Are you considering shipping your own distribution (for instance a modified Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever) and guaranteeing compatibility for that, or do you plan only to issue guides for other distributions?
Yes, we would very much like to rely on the great distros that are already out there for now, working with them as needed to ensure compatibility (which we have already done with a handful).
We haven't tested those internally, but we hope to see folks in the community try them! We are absolutely happy to help anyone who gets stuck, and as we see which distros are popular we can plan out more official support for them.
The Framework Laptop DIY Edition ships without an OS license of any kind. If you want a pre-built Framework Laptop, that does include the cost of a Windows license. The DIY Edition is super easy to set up though: https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework+Laptop+DIY+Edition...
We'll be posting up step by step installation and use guides for a few popular distros soon. We sent pre-release hardware out to developers and maintainers at a few distros and have been working with them on this. In the meantime, we also have a Linux sub-forum in our community where we expect folks will post their experiences with more obscure distros: https://community.frame.work/c/diy-edition/linux/91
The Debian wiki has a section for hardware-specific install guides, that would be a good place to put one for installing Debian on the Framework Laptop:
Very humbly from a full time linux user of 16 years- Id recommend you avoid their crowd- they are entitled and toxic. (as perhaps urself have noticed in this threas)