Yeah I never understood why they are spending so much time on this. Seems like they would be better off improving the hardware offering, or just making generic integrations which work on any Linux distribution?
> or just making generic integrations which work on any Linux distribution
Thats how you make something that doesnt look good or function that well because you're focusing on too much.
They are taking the Apple path with linux. Make the hardware and make the software tailored for the hardware for a great experience. Yes they support people installing on stuff other than their hardware, but they make sure their hardware is supported and runs well.
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.
I mean, sounds WAY better than whatever the heck the Ubuntu people think they're doing these days. Which -- whatever it is, does emphatically not appear to be "making a good and usable desktop."