But opening a jpeg or PDF doesn't really involve any drivers, so driver issues wouldn't explain why those specifically are failing to open. If opening anything caused random freezes, that'd suggest something like the GPU driver might be failing. But otherwise opening JPEGs & PDFs are just generic CPU work, there's no drivers for those.

To be clear, they open fine if I open a compatible program and then open them from within the program.

They just freeze the system if I try to open them from the file explorer.

I've not seen anything like this before.

It sounds like it's failing to lookup what program to launch from the file type. That's all but certainly either a corrupt OS install or a bad storage drive then, and wouldn't be indicative of any general problem with Framework laptop's linux support (or lack thereof).

Honestly, that sounds like a kernel panic. Two guesses: bizarre GPU/driver issue triggered by some kind of preview/desktop environment thing (less likely), or your filesystem is corrupt and/or your SSD has trouble (more likely).

Try `pv /dev/nvme0n1 > /dev/null` (or just cat, but pv will give you a nice progress bar if you install it). If that errors out or your machine freezes, you have a storage problem and probably need to replace your SSD. If that works, try booting in single user mode or from a USB boot drive and running fsck.

You can also try SSHing in from another machine while trying to open the file locally. If the SSH session dies instantly, it's probably a kernel panic. If it survives, you can look at logs and top see what happened (maybe the issue is the desktop environment locks up?)

Sleep issues, the dock stuff, those sound like legitimate driver/support issues that would affect anyone. But opening PDFs crashing your machine really sounds like either your hardware or install is specifically broken and needs fixing, or you're running into a really weird bug that is not hardware-specific.

Do you have a separate partition for /home and other for / ?

I do, and this enables me to delete and reinstall any Linux version without changing my home directory.

It seems reinstalling the operating system is the first thing you should try.

Does that work with flatpaks and snaps that store some app data in /home?

It should. The idea is, you never format or delete what is in /home.

You give them access to that partition

try Fedora on it and see if these issues still persist. It can't hurt and may aid in troubleshooting.