Honestly a Framework+System76 merger would make a lot of sense. System76 cares about the software but uses whitelabeled hardware. Framework has done excellent hardware engineering but doesn't care much about the software.
I don't know that it's fair to say Framework don't care much about the software. Their oldest devices are still getting firmware updates. At any rate, Pop!_OS runs very well on Framework Laptops (though I use Arch + Hyprland, w/ Windows on their storage expansion card).
That's a bit of a hot take considering all the donations they've been making to OSS projects. Sure, maybe they're not making Yet Another Distro but they're donating to and upstreamimg patches to things that everyone (including PopOS) uses.
To me, that's far from not caring about the software. Especially when you compare to other vendors like Pine.
To be clear, this wasn't an attempt at a diss on Framework. They're what my recommended laptop has been for the past ~3 years (and would be what I got if I hadn't gotten my most recent laptop before frameworks were widely available).
What I probably should have said is that System76 takes open software ridiculously seriously in the same way that Framework takes open hardware ridiculously seriously. On the scale of Linux laptops, Framework is on par with Dell and Lenovo (the best of the big OEMs) in terms of upstreaming patches etc.
System76 OTOH is completely crazy. They've put Coreboot on their laptops, built their own DE because they got tired of Ubuntu not shipping proper nvidia drivers, etc.
