For those that don't know all System76 machines come with a little driver package installed called the System76 Driver. What the driver does is add support or enhance the experience of Ubuntu so it can work the best on your hardware. The driver is open source and because of that those drivers are bound to be added to newer versions of the Linux kernel.
One example of the System76 driver use is adding support for the brightness keys on the Gazelle Professional. A vanilla Ubuntu install doesn't have that extra feature added until you install the driver. Their Knowledge76 website lists the features added by installing the System76 driver for a specific device.
The driver has it's own repo as well. When you install the driver it adds itself to your sources list so you always get updates automatically. The package is in the .deb format, which is what Ubuntu uses. However since the drivers are open source you can always grab the source and make it work for a distro that is not Debian based.
The driver has a very simple interface. You don't have to be tech savvy to use it.
