My desktop os getting old and suffer to some issue, in a normal world i would already changed, but as i’m looking for something better i’m still hang on a new product. My pov is if there is some closed firmware or part inside it, ecen if is just one the system is potentially compromised, so i does not worth the buy. Atm every x86 and all arm afaik do have closed firmware, or black box inside, there is hope for risc but it’s still everythibg in developement, the open power is there and raptorcs blackbird is the closest solution to my prpblem, what stop me to buy their product is no europe reseller, firefox still miss the JIT so os not really usable yet and i don’t wanna use chromium even if is unglogleed, and the petiboot/firmware update process is not really iser friendly, last but not least their system is expensive, but if the other problems will be solved tomorrow i will afford the fee.
As user i think that’s a bad situation, because i thibk i will hang till those problems will be solved, but that mean there is still a spot dor companies who care about it, so i hope purism and other companies could solve those issues and offer us a nice full open system
Have you considered buying an ASUS Chromebook C201 and installing Libreboot and Linux? Or if you want a desktop computer, Libreboot lists a couple options.
I predict that Purism’s next project will be a tablet based on the i.MX 8M Quad, and then a laptop after that based on the i.MX 8 QuadMax, so we will eventually get to a 100% free software laptop, but it will probably take a while.
I know about that chromebook but is bot really user friendly. The libreboot pc are too much old, i also need to use VM an ipotetical i mx8 will have virtualization capabilities and enough power to run an entire os inside the vm?
Qemu can run a 32/64 bit Windows VM on i.MX 8M, but it is extremely slow. If you want acceptable performance, Eltechs’ ExaGear Desktop can run a 32-bit Windows VM on ARM processors, which reportedly works well on a RasberryPi 3 B+, which has the same 4x Cortex-A53 cores as the i.MX 8M Quad used in the Librem 5, so you can theoretically turn your Librem 5 into a PC, but I doubt that it will have very fast performance, as much RAM as you want and convergence probably won’t be ready on day one.
Your best bet is to hope that Purism or a similar company will make a i.MX 8 QuadMax laptop. If the Lima GPU driver gets good enough, maybe next year’s Rockchip RK3588 will be a possibility.