this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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    [–] [email protected] 78 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Reject modernity, embrace thinkpad

    [–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago (13 children)

    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.

    [–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    Risc architecture is gonna change everything

    [–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Hasn't that been said for like 30 years?

    [–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago (1 children)

    never said when it's gonna change everything

    [–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

    Right, the year of the Linux desktop will be on RISC V!

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

    All even half-way relevant architectures but x86 and z/Architecture are RISC nowadays: ARM, Power, MIPS (The Chinese tried to revitalise it but they seem to be switching to RISC-V), Atmel AVR. Oh speaking of microcontrollers: Z80 (CISC) still lives though arguably it's genetically an x86. And then of course RISC-V which most of all is an open standard, and a clean slate. Also, the first vector insn set that also runs on hardware that isn't a supercomputer.

    [–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)
    [–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

    I'm pretty sure they meant the open source RISC-V, not any reduced instruction set ISA in general.

    [–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

    Come on man, let them impress us with their technical knowledge and pedantry.

    [–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

    Pretty sure it's just a reference to Hackers.

    [–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    So is POWER. Or basically anything not x86 lol.

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    [–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

    RISC is good.

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

    You mean RISC v? Arm is also risc

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

    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.

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

    And several grand for the just the CPU

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    [–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    There's like 2 arm laptops out there and like 0 risc-v though, that's why they're underrated lol

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

    There are bunch of single board computers and motherboards. If your interested that's the way to go.

    Keep in mind you will be likely limited to software in the Debian repo.

    This is because it is still very new and adoption takes time.

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

    There's quite a number of ARM laptops, even ignoring Apple.

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    [–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)
    [–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

    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.

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    I run a t14 amd. My only complaints are the lower switches and non-upgradable ram like the intel variant

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    [–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    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.

    [–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)
    [–] [email protected] 43 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

    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.

    [–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    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.

    [–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

    Apparently it can also read any decryption keys read by the cpu.

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    [–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

    Didn't knew about the Debian part I thought they said that they will ship an installer with non-free by default and another installer which you can configure.

    Btw I'm on my way to build a new x220 with libreboot and GUIX can we get more free than that? Xd

    [–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

    You might be right on that - you know, everyone faced the challenge to find the right Debian installer :D

    Wow, good luck with your project!

    [–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

    Isn't that a hardware problem though? At some point you want your software to work, and years of reverse engineering for it to do so is a long time for it isn't it?

    [–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

    Well, it's obviously dictated by hardware and the software that manufacturers release for it. I'm not calling enthusiasts to reverse engineer every single driver, that's impossible.

    The point is, there is a lot of proprietary blobs in everyone's systems, and it's not cool. If you ask me, we should obviously shift policies to force manufacturers to open source drivers and management systems.

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

    Is there a completely libre platform out there. I don't have any problem with running a risv-v CPU or anything similar

    [–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    RISC-V should be fine, if price, performance, software support, and form-factors are all okay for you.

    For most, it isn't, but if you wanna go such great lenghts, I'd say you have a chance.

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    [–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)
    [–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

    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.

    [–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

    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.

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