Re: Rethinking the design of xwidgets

[Arthur Miller]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> 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.
>
I was looking many times at Librem stuff, but I would pay additional 25%
for customs if I ordered one to here, so it is a bit on expensive side
for me.

> So, I think we might be better off now than we were before 2000
> in this respect.
Indeed. Unfortunately my Gigabyte mobo from 2016 does not support
neither one if it's network cards nor built in audio chipset in Linux.

> The problem is that this is a shrinking fraction of the
> overall computer market, dominated by smartphones where the situation is
> completely different.
Indeed; I am really curious what is Google hiding in their Android blob.
Wonder why Ubuntu's or Firefox phones never catched up. I don't know how
it goes for librem and their phones.

> 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..."
Yepp; I was mostly thinking of harddrives, chipset drivers. But sure things
are getting better. I think the situation for free (as in GNU) or at least
open source is getting much better than it was.