Re: Rethinking the design of xwidgets

[Stefan Monnier]

> I have hard time to imagine a piece of machinery made since 2000 without
> something proprietary, but I believe you guys looked up that.

Nowadays the main issues for laptops/desktops are:

- Wifi cards: it's not hard to find wifi cards that can run on 100%
  Free Software up to 11n, but I don't know of any for 11ac.
- GPUs: AMD's require proprietary firmware, but AFAIK Intel's GPUs don't
  and I think the Nouveau driver for Nvidia doesn't either.  I believe
  the Free drivers for ARM's GPUs don't use any proprietary
  firmware either.
- BIOS: this is harder to find, but Coreboot/Libreboot/U-boot does
  support several machines from this century.

So, I think we might be better off now than we were before 2000
in this respect.  The problem is that this is a shrinking fraction of the
overall computer market, dominated by smartphones where the situation is
completely different.

I'm writing this on my brand new Librem mini, whose proprietary software
is limited to some blob that's supposed to neutralize Intel's "ME"
horror (oh and I need a proprietary firmware if I want to use the
Bluetooth functionality integrated on the wifi card).  And my home
server is a BananaPi which doesn't use any proprietary code AFAICT.


        Stefan "of course, that's only true until you start looking at
                the code running on our SSDs, etc..."