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Comment by teodorlu | Hacker News Reader

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

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...

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.

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