I purchased it with the intent to use PopOS, and did for the first 3 months, then started distro hopping. I’m a die hard fedora fan, so I just ended up keeping Fedora (I did go back a few times to Pop).
I can’t say Pop was ever an issue, it just worked, and my 10 years old daughter has it in her PC and she’s very happy with it. But even on Fedora, I feel this purchase was absolutely worth it. I got it with as little ram as possible (8GB) and with the smallest NVMe drive (256GB) and then bought 64GB of RAM and two 2TB NVMe drives. It all came at around 500 dollars in savings when compared with the highest build.
You wonder why I didn’t straight up got a Clevo? I’m ashamed to recognize that I never heard of it until a few months after I got my Gazelle. Then there’s the fact that they are somewhat hard to get in the US.
All in all, I want to love to another manufacturer on my next purchase, only because I think there are better options than system76, but not because I think they’re not good enough or anything.