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Comment by jclay | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I'm excited to dig into this.

Crazy to imagine that you could buy a _Microsoft_ Surface, strip Windows and replace with Debian and have a fully open source device.

This raises my odds that they open source the Windows Kernel from ~2% to 4%.

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Issue is you'll likely still need a bunch of binary blobs to boot or use peripherals. And you've still got the Intel ME running. But as far as Microsoft goes, it's definitely evidence that FOSS is here to stay.

Actually it doesn't look that way. You can run Linux on a surface device just fine. The tricky part is largely what they just released: interacting with UEFI and ACPI peculiarities like "connected standby."

Though the surface laptop does have an Nvidia GPU, so there's that piece of proprietary bullshit. :)

> You can run Linux on a surface device just fine.

Where "working" includes problems like multitouch not working, pen not working, some problems with wifi and cameras not working. Some of that can be made to work by using a custom kernel, but the compatibility is decidedly worse than comparable devices.

Er, people have been running Linux on Surfaces for years. With decent UX for a while as well, as I understand it.

see Stallman’s take on modern computers and phones; virtually impossible to distance yourself from proprietary firmware and BIOS

i just don't understand how his take is at all relevant in modern times. i am sure he uses microwaves, refrigerators, homes, vehicles, etc. on a daily if not hourly basis that have non-free software and firmware. what does he or anyone even do with open source, free firmware?

> As for microwave ovens and other appliances, if updating software is not a normal part of use of the device, then it is not a computer. In that case, I think the user need not take cognizance of whether the device contains a processor and software, or is built some other way. However, if it has an "update firmware" button, that means installing different software is a normal part of use, so it is a computer.

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

That... Doesn't make sense. What if the "button" (probably a jumper or connector on the motherboard) isn't normally accessible to the end user, like a lot of embedded devices? If it has a CPU, ROM, RAM and runs code it's a computer!

I think the extreme stance still makes sense, as some things still meet all the criteria. You can get an old ThinkPad or an Asus C201 Chromebook and run libreboot on it with a GNU/Linux distro using no blobs. These aren't bleeding edge, they're not perfect, and they don't come totally free out of the box, but they show that this level of freedom is possible. I think that's enough for us to want to strive for it.

But now you can do it with opensource firmware.

With various degrees of success [1]. Open sourcing the firmware could improve things drastically.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/7kazwp/curren...

I don't understand this comment chain, replies, patterns of downvotes at all.

Nothing, anywhere, indicates that Project Mu has anything to do with "other OSes" on Surface devices. And the grandparent comment is a direct implication that Project Mu would/will be critical to Linux on Surface.

This isn't to say that this is not neat, from what I've heard about TianoCore and the codebase, but linking this to Linux on Surface seems completely invented and just a weird comment given that it already works pretty well, minus missing drivers that will still be missing even with an OSS UEFI core.

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