I’m holding out hope on System76 designing truly custom hardware and we reach the fabled “MacBook of Linux” someday. As of now their Clevo rebadges don’t appeal to me, though their “custom” desktops do.
I'm happy to support a company like that obviously, but it's still frustrating.
System76 should work with these guys as they are doing what System76 should be doing with their laptops.
5 years of updates is lower than macOS (I am on 7 on my MBP 2015).
The recent MBPs sport 5 nm ARM and MiniLED display.
Looks like they do a lot of things right though.
(Matt Hartley, the new Linux Support Lead was formerly providing technical support at System76)
I ended up going with a Framework last year as an upgrade since I liked the display (3:2 HiDPI 400nit+ 13.5") and form upgradability, but also because the official Framework forums was by far the best Linux laptop forum I've seen online. As long as you can deal w/ 5-6h of battery life, I can highly recommend it as one of the best Linux ultraportable laptops (although I'm really hoping that there's a Ryzen 7040 motherboard upgrade coming...). My review/notes on the 12th Gen Framework w/ Arch Linux: https://github.com/lhl/linuxlaptops/wiki/2022-Framework-Lapt...
The strict Clevo-based hardware will always turn me away from buying from them when I can get multiple AMD 6000-based laptops from Asus that run Linux fine (after a wifi-card swap, the MediaTek's they use are useless); and have superior build qualities.
In fact, it has two USB C ports, and both of those are USB 4 and Thunderbolt 4 and having DisplayPort Alt Mode. They also have three USB A ports (3.2 Gen 1), a MicroSD slot, a 3.5mm jack port, and an HDMI port.
There is even a photo with both USB C ports shown. https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2059/5897/files/StarFighte...
What's more, even the charger supports both USB C and DC jack cables interchangeably. You just chose either cable type in configuration, or you buy both cables.
* https://zentalk.asus.com/t5/zenbook/linux-on-zenbook-s-13-ol...
* https://zentalk.asus.com/t5/zenbook/linux-support-on-zenbook...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/yk8nmk/asus_...
Most laptop brands work with/own various ODMs - instead of OEM brands like Asus, Acer, think ODMs like Pegatron, Wistron, Iventec, Compal, Quanta, Clevo, etc - these companies co-design/manufacture laptops for almost all the major OEMs, but most do exclusive designs and niche brands like System76 are probably too low volume to be able to get priority/afford custom design w/ most of the Tier 1 ODMs, hence the prevalence of "white label" friendly ODM designs.
Linux is not even in the same ballpark. System76 apply some tweaks but its still Ubuntu and as a desktop OS its lacking in many areas.