Reject modernity, embrace thinkpad
Honestly Arm and Risc-V are under rated. Not all are libre compatible but there are a few that work well with exclusively free software and have much less power draw.
If you want to talk about underrated look into POWER CPUs.
Motherboards like the tallos 2 are completely open source( except for an nvme storage controller) and they already offer x86_64 levels of performance. The only con right now is software support and the cost.
There’s like 2 arm laptops out there and like 0 risc-v though, that’s why they’re underrated lol
Risc architecture is gonna change everything
Hasn’t that been said for like 30 years?
never said when it’s gonna change everything
Right, the year of the Linux desktop will be on RISC V!
Arm is RISC
I’m pretty sure they meant the open source RISC-V, not any reduced instruction set ISA in general.
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Context?
Debian uses its own version of the Linux kernel with proprietary parts removed; however, if you want to install it on a machine that does have hardware for which there are no free drivers (which is to say almost any machine out there in the market), you’ll have to install proprietary parts; in the last version, Debian 12, system does that by default.
Intel Management Engine is a CPU-level microprogram that runs with highest priority and does not have open code, so essentially every PC with Intel CPU runs some arbitrary code we cannot verify. Same for AMD Platform Security Processor by the way, so there is no simple escape.
Oh and BIOS is proprietary too, and only a few select machines can have a fully libre BIOS successfully installed on them.
Thereby even if you go to essentially libre version of Linux, there will, almost universally, be pieces of obfuscated code with no disclosure on what they’re doing there.
IME is even worse than that. It runs on a supervisor processor in the chipset that has privileged access to the memory, peripherals, and CPU, and can run when the rest of the system is powered off. IME is how Intel AMT can serve as a KVM-over-IP, and just because you don’t have a CPU with Vpro doesn’t mean all the components aren’t there for an exploited or backdoored ME firmware to remotely log your console or inject keystrokes.
i am confused
im still dazzled by games actually running to be that mad.
90% open is fine for now, hopefully my next machine will have open firmware if that AMD open firmware thing goes well.
I was never a fan of SystemD for that reason. As much as I’m a Windows person, I always admired Linux for its simplicity of “everything is a file”, “keep things in text where possible” and “a program does one thing and one thing only”, and between the binary logs and monolithic chunks it just threw that out the window.
