Fixed-hardware Linux platform: curated distro + certified drivers

A fixed-hardware, Linux-based platform provides a stable target for software, something desperately needed for non-Windows PCs. Because the hardware, distro, and so on are well-defined, so are available system components (e.g. GPU), drivers, performance targets, and many other key characteristics about a system. As such, you get much better reliability out-of-the-box on non-Windows than historically feasible. Things like graphics, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, sleep, audio, all have a just higher probability of actually just working. Microsoft avoided this historically by shoveling billions of dollars and thousands of engineers onto the problem. Privileged hardware vendor deals, mass-hardware testing, and huge engineering teams allowed them to keep up with the combinatorics. Trying to do this without the Microsoft engine underneath was always a fool’s errand, which is why on Linux, everything is chaotic, many things don’t work, nothing is cohesively designed, and failure points are everywhere. Having an actual stable platform provides a true alternative to Windows PCs. Given how poorly Microsoft have managed their near-monopoly on the space, that’s excellent news.