I bought a System 76 desktop a couple years ago. I had extra $$ and like you, I wanted to support a company selling Linux devices.

Previously, I had used Ubuntu on multiple laptops that did not have "hand picked" hardware. I was used to having to fix things randomly after updates and just running into hardware issues from time to time.

I assumed that the selling point of System 76 was that because they chose the hardware with Linux in mind these things wouldn't happen.

Maybe it's a QA thing but I found that I was running into just as many issues on my Sys76 machine as my old laptop. Manageable, but really puts the value prop into question. It became difficult to justify the purchase over building my own PC or buying a pre-built machine from someone else.