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Comment by rvense | Hacker News Reader

I gave that comment a downvote because I thought it was disrespectful.

System76 have been providing practical solutions for running free software on available hardware for years now. That does indeed deserve kudos, even from you.

Keeping a kilowatt of computing power running at all times at home and connecting to it with a dumb ChromeOS terminal as you're suggesting is quite honestly not a viable solution for many people. And excluding practicalities (which a real person, of course, cannot) it might even be worse for security depending on your threat model.

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That may be. However, I was using Linux on bog-standard computers before System76 was even founded -- preinstalling Linux on a computer isn't exactly revolutionary, and it's in a completely different league from the work that has been required to bring up entire new CPUs (!) to compete with the increasingly locked x86 systems.

No idea where you're getting a kilowatt from. My desktop uses maybe 120W or so, with a lot of that going to the AMD GPU.

If we're going to trade barbs over ecological damage, what happens to all those Intel and AMD systems that would have been useable if they had just had updates to the locked/signed firmware, but are instead floating around in landfills because the vendor decided they wanted to enforce their control and not issue security updates?

> That may be. However, I was using Linux on bog-standard computers before System76 was even founded -- preinstalling Linux on a computer isn't exactly revolutionary

System76 is making free software computing more attractive and available. You might think of what they do as easier than what you do, and you might disagree with the way they prioritize security over other factors in their products, but I still think it's pretty bad of you to imply that what they're doing is not valuable to this community.

OK, I think I may have been misunderstood...

What they are doing in that space is valuable. However, with just a bit more tweaking, they could offer something a whole lot more valuable in parallel, and leave this whole semi-open x86 issue behind. If they were to offer even a couple of actually open source firmware systems, and indicate somewhere in the marketing that the x86 boxes are only partly open source, that would not only eliminate the entire controversy here but also allow them to take the next logical step in open software. If their core mission has basically been to make open source easy to consume, that's a worthy goal; why not go a bit further and make open source on open hardware with fully open firmware just as easy to consume?

Clearly there's demand, from the comments in this thread alone!

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