System76 Started With $1,500 in a Basement and Ended Up Building Its Own Computers, OS and Desktop
Carl Richell and Erik Fetzer discussed selling Linux computers in 2003 and launched System76 in 2005, shipping machines with Ubuntu. The bootstrapped Denver company never took venture capital, built its own Linux distribution, Pop!_OS, brought desktop manufacturing in-house in 2018, and in 2025 released COSMIC, a Rust-based desktop environment funded entirely by hardware sales.
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