On Tue, 2023-03-21 at 00:16 +0100, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: > Would a Power-based machine in general, and a Raptor Blackbird in > particular, be a good freedom-respecting computer to run a Debian > desktop? RaptorCS devices in particular are quite good apparently. Other POWER devices are likely either too old and only supporting powerpc or way too expensive and having freedom issues (IBM POWER10). The POWER10 issue still blocks RaptorCS from upgrading their CPUs btw. I note that the libre firmware for the RaptorCS Ethernet is not yet packaged in Debian though. I think the device still works without the libre firmware though, since Debian members use RaptorCS but haven't packaged it. I expect there is probably other RaptorCS firmware or software to package too though. The RaptorCS folks are very friendly to Debian so it might be worth talking to them about this. https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open > Or will I have "many" problems like the one described in > https://www.talospace.com/2023/02/firefox-110-on-power.html > that Firefox WebRTC doesn't work on Power? There aren't many open bugs tagged as affecting POWER ports and most of them look like build related failures rather than not working. Probably folks don't bother to usertag their POWER-only bug reports though. https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?user=debian-powerpc%40lists.debian.org https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Debbugs/ArchitectureTags There are of course various build/test issues on POWER ports too. https://buildd.debian.org/status/architecture.php?a=ppc64el https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ftbfs.cgi?arch=ppc64el https://ci.debian.net/status/failing/?arch[]=ppc64el > I don't particularly want to get deep into being a porter Personally I think users of every non-amd64 port should consider doing porting work to keep their ports viable, since your personal package set might not be on the radar of vendors like IBM or other users. In case you do, we now have a document about the different ways to contribute to creating new ports (it applies to existing ports too). Some of the steps may be missing for existing ports, for example all of the POWER ports are missing a page based on the status template. https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New https://wiki.debian.org/PortTemplate > Is there any other Power-based machine that I should consider? The unreleased Libre-SOC might be something for the future. https://libre-soc.org/openpower/ > No candidate laptops I presume? Not sure of the status but this project has been around a while: https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/ -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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