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Comment by boogies | Hacker News Reader

It may depend on your hardware. If it wasn’t made to support Free software it likely doesn’t — particularly for firmware for WiFi cards or Nvidia graphics, which PureOS should not have packages for.

Would appreciate an explanation from whoever was downvoting you before.

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Thanks. I'm currently on a Thinkpad T490s. Intel WiFi and Intel graphics unless I'm mistaken.

No problem. I’d recommend trying it out live, you can get it at https://www.pureos.net/download/ and then follow the installation instructions (https://tracker.pureos.net/w/installation_guide/live_system_...) from there if it works well (make sure to copy your /home directory/partition first if you want to keep it), or not install (and maybe try purifying Ubuntu or Debian a bit with the `vrms` package’s assistance) if it doesn’t.

There are no laptops in the market which support free firmware for WiFi, except those from Purism. So PureOS (without installing additional non-free software) will not work for you.

Alternatively one could use this: https://tehnoetic.com/tehnoetic-wireless-adapter-gnu-linux-l....

> There are no laptops in the market which support free firmware for WiFi, except those from Purism.

There are at least the handful the FSF RYF certifies.¹

Unfortunately you do appear correct about Intel WiFi not having Free software support² (though that adapter certainly should).

¹https://ryf.fsf.org/categories/laptops

²https://h-node.org/wifi/catalogue/en/1/1/Intel-Corporation/u...

I recall running into issues with WiFi firmware from Purism. I installed the prop. driver and got some improvement. Although, I ended up upgrading the wifi chip altogether in the end.

The problem is the lack of freedom-respecting WiFi hardware which supports 802.11ac/ad/ah/ax: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....

Yes, there are indeed RYF-certified laptops supporting free WiFi firmware, but they are now vulnerable to Spectre, Meltdown etc, and not fixable. So unfortunately this is not very secure to use them...

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