| > You might be ascribing quite a bit more leverage to System76... This may be true, but I think that selling corebooted computers is literally just a marketing gimmick. If a computer ('s motherboard) is corebootable, I can coreboot it myself, or lacking the technical skills, ebay have it done for ~$50 (maybe with video proof that the flashed rom is what is expected by showing hashes) I don't expect ANYONE to be able to make intel or amd do anything about this situation, which is why I acknowledge your point: > Now, offering something else (ARM, RISC-V, POWER, anything but x86) as a truly open source alternative... I would love to see a POWER laptop, but I don't have the technical knowledge or money to help make this happen. What I think is holding this back the most is that there are very few people with an ecosystem where they can compile all their own programs, meaning that 99% of computer users won't be able to make use of the general purpose computer underneath, because the software they NEED for their work absolutely will not run on it. As a user however I think freedom is paramount, I'm about to finish up my CS undergrad, and about 3 years ago I became aware of the issues surrounding freedom in computing (literally never brought up in any of my classes), and I bought all the components needed and librebooted myself a thinkpad x200, which I've been faithfully using with parabola/debian ever since. Thankfully this as a platform was within my financial reach. > With our baseline blob-free systems... I laud the efforts of raptorpcs, but these systems are completely out of my reach. My previous sentence should show that I'm willing to compromise a lot to have freedom (no usb 3.0, I stopped playing games that have proprietary code, rebuilt my ecosystem so as to never have to move away from totally libre software etc) I recognize how the fact that these machines exist means that a motivated company can choose to have a free system and that's great! What I'm looking for as a normal user though is a LAPTOP that has these features, and that's why I get hype when someone claims to have one, but it's always a dissapointment, eg. purism. I feel like I'm ranting, but it's honestly a little unclear what I'm responding to. |