What do you use hardware that isn't 100% free software compatible for?
Like so called "smart TVs", I would love to crack those open and put the wifi part either in a Faraday cage or if grounding the antenna is enough, (assuming the Remote uses IR) I would do that. I have a libreboot compatible quad core system and even applying the unix philosophy to online streams by playing the video in MPV, it uses half of my CPU. I've also noticed my mental health has gone down over the past 3 years of not playing video games, so I got a RGH Xbox 360 and it doesn't touch the internet. I hate it from a software freedom perspective, but I like the machine from a hobby and computer engineering perspective. Yeah, I know I should do more productive things, but I'm very self concise with productivity, hopefully this is transitional. Hopefully, I can start feeling better enough where I'm less self-concise and can pursue more ambitions.
I also think of investing in an AM5 CPU platform and using it to pre-encode Videos on "placebo" settings and setting up a Jellyfin server with my libreboot compatible Lenovo with a dead fan and setting up some hackery and turning it into a Switch/Server via PCIe expansion hackery and also use the AM5 system as a compile box that would just play in it's sandbox.
My lifestyle has a very mid-2000's mindset, before streaming, the internet wasn't as important (and mostly Geociies) and Cinemaphiles that could afford to setup Media Center PCs had lots of local storage, it was a time of ripped DVDs and TV tuner cards. Back then, the LAN was where it was at.
Gaming is my achilles heel. Even if I want to play FOSS games. Take Super Tux Kart for example. On a GTX 780 Ti using Nouveau or on my Intel HD 4600 I get about 40 FPS on lowest settings versus on my RX 580 using Manjaro I get 100+ FPS on highest settings. I would love to use my Trisquel systems for gaming as well but i'm too used to max settings and high frame rates to make the toal switch. Through a lot of experimentation I have been able to use my Trisquel system for some gaming as it handles visual novels and many 2D games fairly well but even the 2D games can have lag here and there.
I feel modded consoles are that sandboxed black box sweet spot. I feel even if I had a good GPU, I would still have trouble trying to run Xbox games, so instead of having a high end machine that can't run Xenia, I got something with decent original xbox emulation too.
I wish we knew how the Pentium III CPUs worked and how the Xbox's Nvidia GPU worked so we can make new ones and the Xbox's OS and firmware worked, I'd love to see a libre clone. There's a lot of homebrew ports and I think there's a market for hardware like that not only for the kind of people who want a MISTer but with an Xbox Built in, but that hardware could also double as a Windows 9x/XP compatible hardware. (therefore a good ReactOS candidate for people like us) Old hardware is getting expensive on the used market. so, I think in 10-15 years, we'll see Xbox clones. Old Hardware is getting so expensive, some people just build clones of old hardware, I just saw a video where a guy made an Amigia 4000 circuit board.