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Comment by IlikeKitties | Hacker News Reader

> Now the silicon manufacturers hate that they even have to sell us their scraps, let alone spend time on making unique designs for their boxes.

I genuinely don't believe this to be true for AMD. I bought a 6600xt on Release Day and by the time I was able to build my complete PC, it had upstream linux kernel support. You can say what you will about AMD but any company that respects my freedoms enough to build a product with great linux support and without requiring any privacy invading proprietary software to use is a-ok in my book.

Fuck NVidia though.

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I agree with the spirit of your post, and that AMD is probably the lesser evil, but it's worth noting they "just" moved the proprietary bits into a firmware blob. It's still similarly proprietary but due to the kernel being pretty open to such blobs, it's a problem invisible to most users. You'd have to use linux-libre to get a feel for how bad things really are. You can't really use any modern GPUs with it.

I understand the sentiment, but I don't see how devices with proprietary firmware stored in ROM or NVRAM are any more free or open than devices that require proprietary firmware loaded at boot.

And it looks like Linux-Libre also opposes CPU microcode updates[1], as if bugged factory microcode with known security vulnerabilities is any less non-free than fixed microcode. Recommending an alternative architecture that uses non-proprietary microcode I can understand; this I cannot.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Linux-Libre-4.16-Released

That honestly makes little difference to me. There's no useful computer out there that isn't a bunch of proprietary blobs to interact with proprietary hardware. Wish there was, but if it's practically indistinguishable from just having those blobs burned into the hardware directly instead of being injected on boot it's not perfect but still a pretty good situation.

I remember when running linux on your computer at all was hit or miss, these days i can go to lenovo and buy a thinkpad with ubuntu preinstalled and know that it will just work.

>I genuinely don't believe this to be true for AMD. I bought a 6600xt on Release Day

That was 2021 though when AMD was still a relative underdog trying to claw market share from Nvidia from consumers. AMD of today has adjusted their prices and attitude to consumers to match their status as a CPU and GPU duopoly in the AI/datacenter space.

You can still buy their GPUs, they work perfectly fine on linux ootb and they even make stuff like the AI Max for local AI that is very end user and consumer friendly. Yes, GPUs got more expensive which is a result of increased demand for them. But for a hardware company, as long as their linux support is as good as it currently is, they are a-ok in my book.

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