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Before anyone considers putting money there, they should read this interview by their former CTO. Sounds like a train wreck to me:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-T...

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Reading that, I wonder whether a start up would have a better time offering OS/firmware support for already shipping, mass produced devices. i.e. Buy the latest XPS 15 and get to work making an installer that disables all the things they want to disable (intel ME off the top of mind). Doing similar with phone models, etc. I wonder whether this could be done for Windows drivers, for that matter.

That’s what Purism does already, they are selling bog standard OEM laptops and now “NUCs” with Coreboot at a pretty high premium.

Unlike System76 they aren’t even maintaining a swanky Linux distro like PopOS.

Um, they are maintaining a distro. It’s called PureOS [0].

[0]: https://www.pureos.net

Just to clarify, it’s possible to focus solely on providing drivers for known hardware configurations and across a variety of OSes. Deciding to fork Debian and maintaining a distribution on top of those drivers seems massively unnecessary.

Tuxedo Computers does this.

This is very outdated, with predictions not turned out to be correct. For instance, the most freedom-respecting smartphone on the market has been built.

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