[stingraycharles]

But you need to have a pretty large ecosystem / platform to be the size of Apple to be actually benefiting from the huge investment it takes to maintain an OS / distribution like that. Especially the rewrite to Rust, it just makes me wonder the costs / benefits of this.

Isn't there a more reasonable middle-ground, e.g. just saying "we officially support Ubuntu / Fedora" or something like that, and making sure those two distros actually work well out of the box?

As an anecdote, I have got my framework laptop this summer, and it works really well out of the box pretty much anywhere. I'd argue that framework is a pretty direct competitor to system76, except framework seems to be innovating on the hardware part rather than the Linux distro part. Which makes way more sense business-wise to me.