Making a windows11 bootable flash drive is a mega pain in the balls on anything other than windows. The easiest way to do it is to install ventoy. Then make a bootable ventoy flash drive, download the win11 iso, copy that iso onto the ventoy bootable drive. As long as you’re using a newish version of ventoy, you won’t run into secure boot issues.

Way way way easier than trying to make a dedicated windows bootable installer.

Edit: everything applies to win10 as well

So I can actually comment on both the 13 and the 16 as I helped my family member build a 16. The 13 is my preference for a daily driver for school or for what I use it for - at work. The 16 is best “docked as a desktop, but I can take my powerhouse on the go”. The 16 is a bit bulky to carry around or use on a plane imo.

The 13 The chassis is great. Well built, sturdy, super easy to take apart with a single supplied screwdriver, captive bolts, no glue, etc. Really just a dream to work on. Swappable ports are awesome and they work great. Screen and trackpad are nice, not as nice as a MacBook, better than almost all others. Trackpad bracket is a little flimsy, but it’s replaceable. I’ve had zero other issues. As far as getting locked into their ecosystem. I’m not really worried about about that. Yes if they stop making main boards to fit the chassis, then the laptop gets stale, but the it’s a regular laptop…. All the components are standard thingies you can buy anywhere, ram, ssd, WiFi cards, etc. Battery is OK, I wish it lasted a bit longer. Like everything in the laptop, that’s easily replaceable too. I would say it’s about as future proof as you can get in a laptop.

The 16 The chassis is also great except for the little blank plates on the sides of the trackpad. They work fine, but from a fit and finish standpoint they are lacking. The 16 is otherwise a beautiful machine. Now the gpu- that I believe is subject to “being locked into the framework ecosystem”. Nobody will make a gpu in that form factor except framework. They did just release a 2nd card with a newer gpu in it. Hopefully that continues-so far so good. I both want a 16 and don’t. It’s kind of big. Just depends on what your use case is.

Both beautiful machines that are fantastic to use, and both are “laptops that are like desktops”. There’s other options probably, but I can only compare to thinkpads, Macs, hps, dells, surfaces, asus, and other random windows machines. Never seen a system76. Framework is my favorite, thinkpad is second.

I have a framework 13 running fedora and I absolutely love it. Upfront costs are expensive though - long term cost might be more reasonable (or even less) if I upgrade it for years/decades. Bit early to tell. But I do love it. Best laptop I’ve ever had (and I’ve had them all - even a thinkpad)

Fedora is a great distro. IMO it and Mint are the “it just works” distros. Mint just works, unless it doesn’t - usually a result of bleeding edge hardware. That’s where fedora comes in - newer stuff but without the downsides of something like arch.

The thing with fedora is that it’s “pure”. You have to install codecs and whatnot. Once you realize that there’s a team (rpmfusion.org) that is dedicated to making these things easy - fedora becomes much more tolerable for a newcomer. While it’s a bad idea to copy commands and jam them into the terminal - in this one particular case, I tell people to just copy and paste the commands and just do what they say. Boom nvidia and codecs installed and everything just works.

Good to know, I hadn’t heard that. I still am leery though - they showed their hand.

I’ve been a synology user and fan for over 15 years now. Both personally and at work. They used to be powerful-for-the-price, efficient devices with good software. Photos, drive, media server, file storage, and docker containers were the big use cases. They were easy to set up securely for remote connections, and I’ve never seen one fail.

Nowadays though, I’d recommend something else. They have started on the enshittification journey. They removed hardware decoding features, they force you into their hard drives now, the hardware is overpriced, and other diy systems have caught up wrt features and ease of setup. Synology isn’t bad today, it’s just not the only game in town anymore. You can get more for less money with the same amount of effort.

WRT to data collection-I don’t think they collect anything now. But I’m not sure I trust them anymore. It probably won’t stay that way.

Lots of good advice here. I’ll add a bit about dual booting.

1. the problem with dual booting is when you use the same physical hard drive. Windows doesn’t play nice sometimes on the same drive. Just do yourself a favor and buy a second ssd. Then you can break linux six ways to Sunday and always have a windows backup. (And if you want to be extra safe - you can just unplug your windows drive during Linux install and you can’t f up and pick the wrong drive by accident)

2. dual booting is nice just in case something doesn’t work - you can easily switch back to windows.

3. dual booting sucks because there’s very few things that don’t work in Linux - it just requires a little elbow grease to figure out. But having a windows partition right there leads to many people giving up way too early with fixing their issues.

My recommendation is always to have more than one drive in your computer. It’s YOUR computer. Regardless of what you pick as your “main” OS, you always have another spot to screw around in. Distro hop, extra storage, set up a hiveos miner, whatever. Its flexibility and screwing around with other things helps you understand what’s YOUR computer vs what is Microsoft’s OS.