Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not able to update my post, so I'll leave my edit here: EDIT: If I wanted an ALMOST foss laptop, I would buy a laptop and coreboot it myself. The reason that it's exciting for a company to be doing something like this is because they have leverage in their decisions that I don't as a customer (custom cpu, custom components, choosing components with open firmware that already have good interoperability on the plat…
You might be ascribing quite a bit more leverage to System76 than they actually have here. No one is going to get Intel or AMD to allow open PSP/ME firmware -- AIUI even Google, with the truckloads of chips they buy, isn't able to influence that decision at either x86 vendor. Plus, System76 isn't the ODM -- that's Clevo from what I understand, so their influence on the two x86 CPU vendor(s) will be so far removed as…
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.