Where are Purism, System76, Tuxedo Computers, Starlabs, SlimbookES, and others? Instead there’s Dell, HP, ASUS, and Fujitsu…
Well because of money. You certainly have to pay to get Ubuntu certificated. And you only do this to have a Linux system with support from the manufacturer.
It’s an enterprise problem with an enterprise solution.
The normal personal systems are not in the same segment.
Precisely. It’s not just “it works”, it’s third-party hardware that Canonical tests, certifies and commits to support as fully compatible. They’ll do the work to make sure everything works perfectly, not just when upstream gets around to it. They’ll patch whatever is necessary to make it work. The use case is “we bought 500 laptops from Dell and we’re getting a support contract from Canonical that Ubuntu will run flawlessly on it for the next 5 years minimum”.
RedHat has the exact same: https://catalog.redhat.com/hardware
Otherwise, most Linux OEMs just focus on first party support for their own hardware. They all support at least one distro where they ensure their hardware runs. Some may or may not also have enterprise support where they commit to supporting the hardware for X years, but for an end user, it just doesn’t matter. As a user, if an update breaks your WiFi, you revert and it’s okay. If you have 500 laptops and an update breaks WiFi, you want someone to be responsible for fixing it and producing a Root Cause Analysis to justify the downtime, lost business and whatnot.
