The author pretty clearly states why they used the form factor:
it’s my take on the slab style computers that were somewhat popular before the world settled on clamshell designs for portable computers. I really wanted a TRS-80 model 100 when I was young so this sort of design was a big influence.
not everything is built for everyone, and that’s cool & fun
arch on my two laptops, and desktop. proxmox on my server as the hypervisor, and debian on the vm/lxc. my routers are running openwrt.
one of my laptops i use for testing, and i do switch distro’s… i’ve tried alpine, gentoo and i’d like to try openbsd. but arch is comfy