I am curious if the fact that a lot people use pop os on hardware other than system76 hardware is detrimental or helpful towards the development of the OS and the workload of the devs. Like if the number of users of pop os on different hardware configs increases, is that helpful for the devs considering that it may increase the number of bugs and hence result in an increase in worload
In general, I think it is a positive thing as it brings Pop!_OS to more users and thus increases the chances of gaining new contributions.
For instance, I run Pop on 4 non-System76 devices and because I enjoy the distribution so much, I’ve contributed a few fixes to the distribution. If Pop didn’t work well on most non-System76 hardware, I would not have used it nor would I have contributed to it.
Moreover, I actually do contribute financially to System76 by donating here: https://pop.system76.com/. You can provide a monthly donation directly to System76 for Pop if you wish.
Additionally, most (x86_64) hardware is not that different and a lot of bugs/issues occur at a layer above the actual hardware differences. For example, there was a bug in how bluetooth was handled during suspend and resume a year or so ago. This impacted both System76 machines and non-System76 machines and a few of the contributors to the eventual fix (including myself) helped debug and implement a fix despite not running System76 hardware.
Finally, because of how well Pop works and the interaction of the developers and the community I am more likely to purchase a System 76 device for my next machine (hoping the new Virgo is as amazing as the teasers have been hinting at).