Thanks @irvinewade . I have a tangential question that might be better as its own post: are any of the firmware blobs “sticky”? That is, would I “taint” the hardware by booting something other than PureOS?
Yes, I believe so. Probably most of them.
In the case of WiFi, it at least in some minor sense depends on which WiFi card you have (old: Redpine Systems, or new: SparkLAN). Tips & Tricks · Wiki · Librem5 / docs / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab
If you have that level of concern then, yes, you are accepting that (small?) risk in trying a different os - with the understanding that all blobs are bad / all blobs are by definition opaque / you cannot assert with certainty that a Purism-supplied blob is safer than a blob coming from somewhere else (depending of course on what that ‘somewhere else’ is, and I guess depending on what your threat model is).
On the other hand, quite a few users of the Librem 5 have tried out and/or continue to run alternative operating systems i.e. other than PureOS.
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