I just got my wife the AMD 13, and eventually installed Linux. Mint got going after several false starts on a couple of different distros (couldn’t enable hibernation in Ubuntu, encrypting the home directory in Mint caused the machine to reboot into emergency mode- what?), but as soon as she fired up Fallout Shelter on Steam the fans ramped up to full blast and stayed there, and the bottom of the laptop got rocket hot. Literally as soon as the title screen came up. It’s definitely not that intense a game.
After much fiddling with apps and settings, we gave up and tried Windows, which seems to have no issues.
My wife doesn’t really care either way, but it annoys me now that I have to get a Windows license (I would have been set if MS hadn’t just killed the upgrade program), and that I couldn’t get things to work the way I wanted. Given more time, maybe, but her old laptop was on its last legs, and I didn’t want to keep her waiting while I tinkered.
Just ranting a bit, just disappointed.
Whenever you have bleeding edge hardware, you need the latest kernel for support. Mint is to my knowledge great for 1 year old hardware, but yeah it does take that 1 year. Might be good to try a rolling release or a more recent release such as Fedora. I use OpenSUSE personally and have never run into problems, albeit I currently do not have the amd chip.
Mint is effectively Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Treat it as such and it should be fine. The main differences are Cinnamon, Mate, or Xfce instead of the horrid Gnome and flatpak instead of snaps. I’d expect the Framework directions to get 22.04 LTS working to also work on Mint.
Mint does have an ‘edge’ iso, using Ubuntu’s newer ‘-edge’ packages from 22.04 LTS.
Ensuring you have the latest Framework BIOS is also helpful - Its known to have solved some people’s issues.
Beyond Fedora 39, other distros are not “officially” supported by Framework in part because there’s countless many of them, partly because some of them are either ‘rolling releases’ or quite short term (Ubuntu non-LTS releases are EOL after 9 months). The “long list of instructions” Framework offers for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is for this reason - Its stable, reliable, and well supported overall but also nearly 2 years old so lacking in support for 2023 hardware. As a workaround you could try Ubuntu 23.10, upgrading that to 24.04 LTS next April - It would be based off packages mostly from spring/summer 2023.
I don’t have a FW13 AMD, but do have FW16+dGPU on order. It will be running Mint Cinnamon Edition. Not especially concerned about issues… I have no problem building my own kernels if need be (I already do that anyway to use current stable releases - 6.6.1 currently) and do use certain PPAs (kisak-fresh and Rob Savoury’s archives - I do kick a few bucks his way for private repo access) to bring Mint 21.2 much more current than stock Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.