You missed the key part of that sentence: '... for competitors' I was only speaking to the 'why spin their own distro?' question and pointing out that differen

You missed the key part of that sentence: '... for competitors' I was only speaking to the 'why spin their own distro?' question and pointing out that differentiation of System76 hardware (which is standard and also available to their competitors) or software (which is free/open source so also available to their competitors) is very, very difficult to do without spinning their own distro. And even then, the differentiation is minimal on the product side. This is a problem for them because undifferentiated commodities tend to compete purely on price... hence the distro.