[aragilar]

The author seems to limit their analysis to laptops. As far as I know, desktop/server class hardware does have reasonable options like those from Raptor Engineering (such as Talos: https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/talos_comparison.php), though I could be wrong. Could this more of an issue relating to how laptops/phones are built/marketed/sold compared with desktops/servers (and given those effects, building a free-software-based laptop/phone is practically impossible given the lack of possible components)?

[marcan_42]

Indeed, the Raptor systems are about as free as you can get for a desktop system, as far as I can tell. I was particularly impressed when they pointed me at the source code for their RAM training routine; that one has been a sticking point in many other systems.

They still aren't 100% free because that is impossible; there is no clear line to be drawn between hardware and software, and the hardware isn't free. But at least we can truthfully say they have no nonfree mutable blobs or large ROMs, and even some critical small ROM blobs are documented and open source, like the CPU boot ROM.

(We can't say there are no nonfree ROM blobs - I guarantee there's a small CPU running nonfree ROM code somewhere in an IC on the board and they just don't know about it, because manufacturers do that all the time - and besides, even if their systems somehow avoid that, your monitor, keyboard, and mouse will all have that problem).