Linux

Linux has always been the way you've described across many different distros for me over the years.

By far the most stable for me was Fedora. I've been running CachyOS over the last year or so and it's been solid.

Until today. For some reason KDE takes forever to startup now. A few apps have this problem as well.

Since you say the thing is working fine on Windows, there's almost certainly a bug or several. I'd say probably a driver in the kernel, but could be something else. Changing distro or kernel version does sometimes help with that sort of thing, mainly because another distro may have newer or older kernels and other software, and bugs get both introduced and fixed every release.

Freezing issues can have lots reasons, including buggy apps, RAM exhaustion due to memory leaks, bugs in the graphics drivers or graphics stack more generally, various blocking I/O things taking unexpectedly long due to network issues or faulty hardware or drivers.

If you want a chance to figure this out, you probably need to run things in the terminal, like installing software updates through the apt and snap (?) cli utilities. GUIs are notoriously shit at reporting unexpected errors, whereas all sorts of programs (including GUI apps if you start them in a terminal) do regularly print warnings and error messages to stderr, which will show up in a terminal. This is because it's easy for the programmers to do that with just single printf() (etc.) line.

For driver issues, looking at the kernel logs can sometimes show interesting things as well. I will say that, when looking at logs or terminal output, there often are warnings that are completely unrelated and/or harmless, and that's not necessarily obvious to the user.

If this is a software issue, framework imho shouldn't advertise their stuff being able to run Ubuntu if they cannot stay on top of issues that are happening in this configuration.

I use Zorin OS 17 (based on ubuntu) on a desktop AMD based system and a framework laptop 16 for about a year now and even before that used an older version of Zorin OS for about 4 years on a shitty lenovo laptop and never had any stability problems. Even the lenovo still runs reliably.

The only problem I've had on the desktop is that the linux driver for an ntfs formatted drive constantly corrupted my data on that drive to the point where some of the data got lost. All other drives are formatted with ext4 and work without any problems. Maybe your problems could be similar?

Do your issues appear on a fresh install? At my admittedly limited level of expertise, I'd probably start from there. If a clean install works properly, then something that's happening later is messing it up. You'd have to keep track of changes you make to your system and check for issues as you go.

If a clean install is borked from the get-go, maybe try different distros. Since Framework supports Fedora, I'm surprised that anything would go wrong.

I don't know if Framework offers any support or warranty, but you could check with them too.

I'd love to know what hardware you are using as well.

What do you mean by unstable? I don't get what this means. Install? Perhaps choosing a graphical install if available for your distribution of choice. I've heard nice things about Mint (can't tell, I'm using Artix, and Guix is in my plans).

That said, US or EU are not that different. Actually the EU is little by little deteriorating the data privacy it used to say it protected, but moreover, even if the data is kept in EU, what does it prevent US gov or corps to get access to the data? Did people forget about the 5 eyes, the extended ones (not sure how many, there were several extensions)? Did people forget that no matter the current differences, the EU and the US are allies (not just politically) any ways?

Linux (kernel) itself has already identified itself as a US org, since it complies with the US requirements and law, to the point of banning developers from countries the US doesn't like to be cooperating with US orgs (whether gov or not).

So, focusing on country based software developers shouldn't be the main motivation. Looking for free/libre software if possible, so that you get some freedoms of yours sort of intended to be protected through licenses, or if not available then open source, is what we should be looking for. On top of that, communication software should be e2ee, and if possible distributed or peer to peer, or at least decentralized, and so on. Also we tend to forget that the data kept in the cloud is no longer yours anymore, no matter the cloud, neither the country, and if in need to keep personal data on some cloud we should make sure it's encrypted, but still the data keeps being the cloud owner hands, so having personal backups is important, and clouds usually don't advertise what metadata they leak.

Having said that Fedora sounds OK to me while Ubuntu sounds too commercial to me and actually now a days looking for users to get packages from its own "app store". Instead of the "country of origin" for a distro, perhaps more importantly it is to see what your needs are, for example do you prefer rolling release vs. stable releases? Do you prefer vanila kind of packages (as close to upstream as possible) or your fine with the distro making changes to the upstream software as that serves better your purposes? How user friendly the distro is? Though perhaps you're out of options if the framework laptop requires firmware or patches not found upstream, then you might better stay with the "officially supported" distros, unless what you miss by not having such firmware or patches is something you can live with, but usually x86 laptops are "easily" used with gnu+linux on top, except for some drivers not fully working with your hardware or missing firmware, but people usually still uses those laptops with gnu+linux on top. For arm laptops (I believe framework has laptos with arm CPUs, and actually is offering some initial ones with risc-v cpus) that tends to be a little more involved and I personally have no experience with that, and actually I'm waiting for a cheap enough and not so low level risc-v laptop or mini-pc to start experimenting with it (not all distributions support arm and even less risc-v).

Again, I've heard nice things of Mint, particularly for people new to gnu+linux, and it's not a rolling release distribution. Though I'm one of those thinking that rolling relase distributions are easy to live with, at least not on the server spectrum (there are actually servers running on top of rolling release distributions such as Arch, but that's not the majority of them) given they can't afford reboots (very few updates actually require reboot on gnu+linux, linux/kernel itself being one of those which better get a reboot ASAP but not necessarily immediately) or changes requiring a service to drop even for a little while. But with rolling releases one doesn't have to deal with big differences between distribution major versions upgrades, and the changes requiring using intervention when upgrading packages are distributed on time, so no need to focus on a lot of them at once.

Just my two cents, :)

For you I suggest this >> Aurora.

Everything will work out of the box, you won't get weird errors like Ubuntu gives, you can go back easily from GRUB if something goes wrong. Being an atomic distro may feel different but I'm sure you won't mind.

Arch also can absolutely be installed just as quickly as any other distro if you use the archinstall script. I used it recently to install KDE plasma onto a Chromebook from 2017 and everything worked exactly as expected, I haven't had any issues with stability so far. Can absolutely be done in under half an hour. It ofc doesn't come with the advantage of understanding exactly how your system is set up, like you would if you did it yourself.

The last time I did that (slightly different setup with xfce) though I broke it somehow and ended up with if freezing often when booting, although I'm still not sure if that was a hardware problem or not, but it doesn't seem to be happening anymore. I also broke something with the audio jack somehow around then during an update, but chromebooks have weird audio drivers and you need to use this script maintained by (afaik) one person in their spare time. Anyways I would expect a framework laptop to handle it better as it's newer and more common hardware.