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.
Not only will ARM and Risc-V likely not save Linux it will most likely harm it. I doubt there will be many Linux computers running Arm and Risc-V and the few computers that use those architectures won't run Linux well. M series Apple computers only run with reverse engineering and even then many basic features don't work.
can confirm, T480 slaps.
It's great for the price, but it's got plenty of issues.
The gpu is worse than useless most of the time, the cpu is perma throttled on Linux, split battery issues and you can't choose which one to use or when to stop discharging, the keyboard is worse than on the xx20 models, USBC can't be replaced
Also, you missed the point of the joke. T480 most certainly does have IME, and it can't be corebooted.
Which OS do you have on that?
Permanently Deleted
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.
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.
Why would you panic more from #3 than #1?
Backdoors in the CPU microcode, backdoors in the proprietary firmware of your motherboard / hard drives, backdoor through Intel Management Engine / AMD PSP. They're all hardware level backdoors that can't easily be disabled / replaced on newer systems.
There are only a select few of systems out their that can run a fully free BIOS with no IME, but those systems are about 15+ years old. In terms of freedom, we're fucked. Even if you do switch to GNU/Linux, you're still not entirely free.
That is all true. The way to fix this is by always being pro-active, it can mean:
- Voting with our wallets. Show that you will always spend on the more privacy-respecting option, even if no perfect option exists.
- Raising our voices, to family and friends. Elaborate why we need open tech.
- Lobbying for open hardware and software initiatives. The goal is to make openness and freedom more profitable than closed tech.
Pro-activeness is important. Assume that our generation was perfectly privacy-demanding, that this was truly a core value that everybody held. If the next generation became lax on this issue, and didn't care as much, things would start to deteriorate. Totalitarianism would creep in. So the current generation are always the torchbearers of freedom, we have to do our part.
i am confused
Answered to another comment. In short: it's very hard to make your PC run fully libre software, and no consumer-grade solution can do that.
Answered to another comment. In short: it's very hard to make your PC run fully libre software, and no consumer-grade solution can do that.
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.
Framework will save us!
