good freedom-respecting computer for running Debian
Is there any good low-hassle freedom-respecting reasonable price
reasonable performance computer platform for running Debian these
days? My main computers (desktop and laptop) are due for a planned
refresh (like, for once, not refreshing in urgency because they
broke). The more free-as-in-freedom, the better, but also it has to
_work_ and not get in the way "too much". I don't particularly enjoy
hardware tinkering, I want to concentrate on software, thank you very
much. Let's say the least non-free firmware possible; I suppose at
this point I can't hope for free hardware.
I've got a sour taste with the offering of amd64-based systems; the
Intel-based ones have the Management Engine deeply embedded (efforts
of the likes of puri.sm and system76 to battle that notwithstanding),
I hear the AMD ones have something similar now. From what I can
gather, there are only out-of-production mainboards, (ASUS KCMA-D8 and
ASUS KGPE-D16), and the CPUs themselves are and... it they are also
out of production. Even though it is all available "refurbished"
and/or second-hand, this feels like a dead end.
For laptops... refurbished Lenovo machines.
I kinda "know" AMD (ex-ATI) graphic cards are supposed to work better
than NVidia ones with free drivers, but each time I emergency-replaced
my amd64 motherboard, the shop was all "nope, I can get you NVidia in
a few days, but no stock of ATI/AMD at suppliers"... so I've been each
time running the oldest NVidia card I could find, and the nouveau
driver feature matrix
https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html is depressing... I
don't really care about most features, but let's say I want
accelerated video, dual head (RandR) to run my two nice monitors at
1440x2560 resolution. Which requires two HDMI (1.3), DisplayPort or
USB-C outputs. Don't care much about 3D really.
I'm willing to pay some price premium for a free platform, but not an
order of magnitude more. I'd like ECC memory... at least on my
desktop? I'd like it to "feel" like an upgrade also in performance to
what I'm running now, hopefully that will be really easy given the age
of my machines, namely a desktop with an Intel Xeon E3-1271 v3
(released in 2014) and a ThinkPad X200s with an Intel Core 2 Duo L9400
(released in 2008). I also kinda hope for something rather quiet, too,
I've been developing increasing tinnitus and I already wear
noise-cancelling headphones when next to my desktop :-|
It seems the only serious contenders, available new, with a future,
would be Power and ARM?
In the Power realm, I'm aware only of the Raptor series, starting with
the "Blackbird" which even seems to be available from a European
seller now, namely vikings.net? On the other hand, I read that Firefox
WebRTC is broken on Power
https://www.talospace.com/2023/02/firefox-110-on-power.html
the Debian package fails to build... for two months now (since
109.0-1). I mean, I don't mind using firefox-esr (that's what I use
anyway), but that could be a hint that my desktop experience will be
miserable?
Also, I also "see" rumours online that Raptor is not doing going up to
Power10, so it that a dead end in practical terms over the next years?
On the ARM side, ... I don't know anything for desktops. Is something
around? The Power/Talos afficionados say modern/recent ARM systems
also has freedom problems, but I haven't seen them articulate
what. What about that?
As far as laptops are concerned... Anyone has good recommendations?
The Pinebook Pro order page says "don't order if you are seeking a
substitute for your X86 laptop" (???) and I've recently stumbled upon
the MNT Reform. Thare are the Apple machines, but it looks like
getting GNU/Linux to run on them is a lot of reverse engineering with
no good documentation/support from the manufacturer (I mean, kuddos to
the ones doing it, but if I could avoid supporting that kind of
non-cooperation with my money...), that basic-to-moderate hardware
features are still not ready upstream (much less in Debian
soon-to-be-stable testing out of the box...), and replacing a
Microsoft tax with an Apple tax... not sure that's an improvement?
Thanks in advance for your advice,
--
Lionel
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