For the purposes of this post I’m using “Coreboot” to refer to any combo of Coreboot plus a BIOS alternative like SeaBios.
For most people I think Coreboot offers more theoretical freedom than practical. I’m thinking particularly in terms of “control over your own computing”. With a traditional proprietary BIOS you can do all kinds of things that you can’t do with Coreboot (unless you happen to be a Coreboot developer).
Of course theoretically you can do far more with Coreboot but what good is freedom if you can’t use it?
only if you define freedom as the ability to configure settings which are mostly irrelevant and only offered to present the user the illusion of control / because the OEM was too lazy to properly configure things after developmental testing
I have this same problem all the time but expand that question to operating systems themselves. I like your term practical freedom. You might be increasing your freedom to do whatever you want when you use Linux, as long as that want doesn’t include everything that everyone else has access to with like an MacOS box where you can use propriety software and open source software lol. Its like choosing to live alone on an island with no rules and complete freedom, but you also don’t get the benefit of all the conveniences that society as built for you. Obviously thats a huge exaggeration…
it’s ‘maybe’ true that Coreboot (or PureBOOT) + SeaBIOS on libre-hardware does ‘limit’ you somewhat but that limitation is NOT a functional one it’s merely a thing that we’ve been used to ‘have’ with proprietary motherboards such as RAM frequency tweaking and various OC features but what do we REALLY know ?
if it’s a blackbox it may well be a dud … and you thought your CPU was pushing 5Ghz while in reality it was simply pulling more power from the wall and wasting it with random/useless cycles …
that last is probably an exageration since on AMD hardware even if you can squeeze some more performance with higher frequency RAM, it’s not so much. you can observe the fact that the power consumption has ALSO gone up and some benchmarks like the Blender one will show a higher score but for most users …
But for an average user everything except selecting a boot device is missing. Fan control, performance tweaking, boot order selection, over/under clocking, power management, device management, virtualisation settings, etc. etc.
I don’t mind making tweaks in the Coreboot source and recompiling and I’m aware of userland apps that can achieve many of the things you often find in UEFI settings. The only real problem I have with changing settings is knowing that they are available. The discoverability level of Coreboot settings is close to zero for someone unfamiliar with Coreboot. Luckily for me there are people who can tell me what files to edit to achieve things I want, but this relies on me knowing what I want.
