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Bootstrapped Linux box-botherer flogs new Thelio kit, talks up COSMIC, and politely declines to bolt AI onto everything

INTERVIEW There are only a handful of dedicated Linux PC vendors. One of the best-known is the 20-year-old American company System76. It's not just a business that installs Linux on PCs. System76 is building something rare in 2026: a vertically integrated Linux‑first computing stack that treats open source as an engineering north star, not just marketing copy.

We spoke to founder and CEO Carl Richell about where System76 began and where it's going.

When Richell started System76 20 years ago, he had "$1,500 in my basement" and no venture capital. He only had a bet that there were enough serious Linux users to sustain an honest, Linux‑only PC company. It has since grown organically into a factory operation in Denver, where raw aluminum sheets and billets come in one end and finished Thelio desktops roll out the other, complete with in‑house firmware and Linux preloads.

It wasn't an immediate success. The growth curve was incremental. The company started in a basement, moved to a tiny office, then a slightly larger office, a still bigger one in downtown Denver, and, more recently, System76 operates out of its own factory. There, the company says, its servers, desktops, and laptops are "designed by nerds. Engineered by experts. Handcrafted by humans."

All this was funded, Richell said, by reinvested profits and conventional machinery loans rather than venture capitalists. This was by design. That choice means there's no VC partner demanding an "exit" or pushing for a pivot away from Linux and open source; Richell says they "work for our customers and we work for each other," and have "never had to really roll the dice on the company," just take calculated risks.

That deliberate pacing also shaped the culture. Many of the engineers who could "go work at Google" stay, he argues, because their "true beliefs align" with System76's open source‑first mission, not a retrofit of openness onto an ad business. For a niche OEM in a hostile, margin‑thin PC market, that ideological stickiness might be as important an asset as any product spec sheet.

System76 likes to talk about its community roots, but the company's survival story is written in purchase orders. More than half of its sales are business‑to‑business, and Richell says there are "very few Fortune 500 companies that we don't ship products to," even if those deals are typically developer and engineering rigs rather than sprawling, company‑wide rollouts.

Those systems often land in engineering departments and university labs as developer desktops, AI workstations, or high‑end Linux boxes for research workloads rather than accounting PCs. The pitch is a fully integrated Linux platform: hardware designed and manufactured for Linux in Denver, Pop!_OS and COSMIC developed in‑house, and open firmware that can be audited, modified, and redeployed.

In a year when AI datacenters have driven up the cost of memory and storage, System76 entered 2026 expecting "much harsher headwinds" from component prices. Instead, demand stayed strong, and the business continues to grow year‑over‑year, suggesting that for a certain class of customer – developers, researchers, and Linux‑centric organizations – the premium for a well‑supported Linux workstation is easier to swallow than the friction of fighting Windows or bespoke dual‑boot setups.

System76 keeps that business by pairing the product with the kind of operational plumbing most open hardware upstarts never quite build. That includes tightly coupled support, sales, and engineering teams (support is "ten feet from the sales team") and the ability to trace customer pain directly into product changes. It's a Linux company built like a small enterprise vendor, not a boutique enthusiast shop.

On the hardware side, 2026 is the beginning of a new design era, centered on the freshly redesigned Thelio desktop family. Mira is the high‑performance mid‑tower, aimed at users who need serious CPU and GPU throughput in a comparatively compact box. Thelio Major stretches into high‑end desktop territory with support for Threadripper‑class CPUs, ECC memory, and dual power supplies to feed multiple top‑end GPUs.

Richell describes Mira as the "beginning of that new desktop design refresh," a platform that lets System76 relearn thermal dynamics, structural design, and manufacturability at scale. They put the chassis through adhesive and mechanical torture tests – robots repeatedly pulling the side and front panels off thousands of times – to ensure the new modular construction would withstand years of use and field servicing.

Next up is the Prime, a mini‑ITX desktop that shrinks the new design language into an "adorable, tiny desktop" now going through thermal testing. Further out is "Paleo Mega," an AI workstation designed to carry the thermal and power lessons from Mira and Major into multi‑GPU, AI‑first configurations, where cooling and power delivery are often the limiting factors. The product cadence shows a company that now thinks in platform terms: reuse chassis and thermal designs across a family, and then specialize for AI, compact workstations, and other niches.

COSMIC and Pop!_OS as a buildable desktop

If hardware is where System76 proves it can build real machines, software is where it tries to shape the broader Linux ecosystem. COSMIC, its Rust‑based desktop for Pop!_OS and other distros, is explicitly designed to be "modular and composable," with components you can replace, extend, or use as building blocks for entirely new UI experiences.

Richell argues that before COSMIC, there "wasn't really a Linux desktop… designed to build things" in the way the kernel or the LAMP stack are foundations for other work. COSMIC's components have strict, well‑defined dependencies and are built to be reassembled – by OEMs, distro maintainers, or specialized platforms – into custom desktops for different devices and use cases. In System76's ideal world, COSMIC becomes the UI layer you reach for when you're building your own Linux‑based system, not just the default skin on Pop!_OS.

On the user‑facing side, COSMIC is already shipping as a rolling‑release desktop, with new features and fixes flowing into users' machines as soon as they clear QA rather than on slow, monolithic schedules. Since its December 11 release, the project has seen roughly 1,200 merges from 172 contributors, a pace more reminiscent of a popular upstream project than a vendor‑specific shell.

That rolling strategy matters right now in gaming, where System76 is devoting fresh attention. The team has recently added support for Wayland's pointer capture protocol, so first‑person shooters and "infinite scroll" scenarios behave correctly, fixed full‑screen window handling for workflows like Steam Big Picture, and tightened a long list of "around the edges" behaviors that used to require user workarounds. In Richell's telling, the aim is to make gaming "just work" on Pop!_OS + COSMIC without hidden incantations, a necessity if Linux gaming is going to be credible outside the hobbyist circle.

Pop!_OS itself runs atop Ubuntu LTS, with System76 adopting what Richell – over some internal grumbling – still calls a "hardware enablement stack": newer kernels, Mesa, and related bits to keep up with GPUs and emerging hardware, while COSMIC continues to roll on top. The current release tracks Ubuntu 24.04 LTS; Pop!_OS 26.04 is expected to follow roughly a month after its upstream release, with some delay thanks to Canonical's recent DDoS‑related infrastructure issues.

Critically, Pop!_OS has gone "entirely over to Wayland." That move, Richell says, freed the team from trying to build a cutting‑edge desktop on top of legacy X11 stacks and let them align COSMIC with the latest graphics and input pipelines from the start.

Ask any Linux vendor about AI in 2026, and you'll likely get a flurry of product names; System76 is more circumspect. While Canonical, for example, is busy wiring "agentic AI tools" into Ubuntu so they're easy to add, Richell says System76 is still "thinking about it" and sees "more questions than answers" for now.

The areas where he does see clear value for AI are pragmatic, Linux-user-focused ones, including accessibility features that can leverage AI, and smarter launchers that go beyond fuzzy string matching to actually understand user intent when they hit Super and start typing. In that world, the launcher might answer questions, locate files, or trigger workflows that shrink the distance between "I want this" and "it's done."

But AI features will have to be optional, he insists, and designed with "the community's concerns around AI" in mind. For now, the company's to-do list prioritizes HDR, gaming polish, and foundational desktop work over embedding language models everywhere. That restraint might frustrate some early adopters, but it aligns with System76's tendency to ship infrastructure first and pretty features later.

On the hardware side, AI shows up more directly in plans for the Paleo Mega workstation and in the market forces buffeting System76's bill of materials. GPU and memory prices are being driven upward by datacenter AI demand, which in turn raises the costs of high‑end desktops and workstations. The surprise for Richell is that demand for System76's boxes has held steady despite those increases, suggesting a base of customers who see local, Linux‑native AI workstations as a necessary capital expense rather than a nice‑to‑have.

If there's a single idea that animates Richell when he talks about System76's next decade, it's the dream of "liberating the entire stack." Open source has already transformed the operating system and much of the software above it; he'd like to see hardware follow, turning the motherboard, firmware, and even some silicon into something you can read, fork, and improve.

To that end, he said, "anything that we design inside of System76 is open hardware." System76 wants to go further with open hardware by creating reusable components that others can build into their own designs. Think of chassis elements, power distribution boards, or controller modules that can be dropped into third‑party projects – hardware analogs to open libraries and frameworks.

The obstacles are obvious: CPUs, memory, and most major silicon are still dominated by opaque supply chains, NDAs, and closed firmware. RISC‑V offers a path toward open instruction set architectures, and System76 is watching that space as a way to eventually reduce its dependence on closed processor platforms. In the meantime, it has chipped away where it can, shipping its own open EC (embedded controller) firmware and adopting coreboot‑based system firmware on many laptops, closing a gap Richell once thought might never be solved.

"It took us 15 years, but we got there," he says about open firmware. That timeline is probably the right yardstick for the rest of the hardware vision. Over the next decade, he wants System76 to take on more design and manufacturing in‑house, build more of its own components, and gradually expand the platform's surface area that can be studied, modified, and reused by others.

The company will never be able to satisfy the most uncompromising free‑software purists – Richell readily admits they can't "work in a totally purist fashion" and stay in business – but its trajectory is pointed toward more openness, not less. For many developers and organizations who want control without giving up modern hardware, that may be enough.

In 2026, most stories about PCs involve consolidation, commoditization, or retreat from the desktop toward cloud services and locked‑down devices. System76 is betting on a different future: one where there's enduring demand for machines you can understand, repair, and reimagine, running an OS that treats you as the operator rather than the product.

It's a risky path. The company operates in a small, noisy niche where many rivals have tried and failed; Linux‑only hardware vendors have come and gone, often leaving behind little more than a blog post and some unfulfilled orders. System76's answer is to behave less like a startup and more like a craft manufacturer crossed with a small enterprise vendor: design your own hardware, invest in a factory, write your own desktop, and grow slowly enough that you never lose sight of the people actually using the machines.

If the next ten years look anything like what Richell hopes, System76 could end up not just as "the company that still makes Linux desktops," but as the reference implementation for an open, full‑stack computing platform. In a world increasingly defined by black‑box AI and sealed hardware, that might be its most radical feature. ®