Thoughts about fully free computers
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In this period unfortunately I don't have enough money to buy a fully Free Laptop, also because the price is not really cheap. I understand that the price may be fair and is not possible to reduce it since companies that sell fully free computers at lower price wouldn't earn enough. On the other side most of fully free computers are not powerful and they are not new (except very few of them). Also I don't know if ThinkPenguin's laptops are completely free since they have modern CPUs (with intel ME).
Even if am using a laptop with ME, I am running a entirely free OS.
And I am really worry about the situation (not mine but in general), because one day older laptops will not operate, laptops from 2008 (approximately when ME was realized) cannot exist forever. And I don't know what will be the alternative one day. For now, in my personal opinion, fully free computers are not for everyone. We can buy a low price 100% free computer but compared to a new one (with intel ME and many more performances) is more expansive, and if I want to buy a more powerful machine (but not yet as powerful as a modern one) I have to spend much more money (from 700$ to 1000$).
I want to underline that it's nobody's fault, or may be is manifacturers fault. Society and Companies are not moving on the right way, and no company (like HP, Lenovo, Dell, etc..) is selling fully free computers.
I am a member!
It's easy to find a working X60/X200 in the garbage, flash it with
Libreboot, and use it. For most things, they work. I play Minetest and
watch movies in Kodi without issues.
My only problem is VMs, and this has made it hard if not impossible to
work on Trisquel 8.
I am a member!
I agree with your post Heather, particularly loved this bit:
>As your X60 (or whatever you are currently using) becomes older, you will also grow
>and learn how to use less resource-intensive software that may take a bit more practice and skill...
One more thing, the OP mentions "powerful machines." The real question is what you want to do with the computer. Beyond the marketing hype and as far as my use case is concerned, there are only two types of computers: fast and slow*. A computer is slow when I have to wait for it and fast when I don't. This will depend on what you wish to compute.
Based on the above, I've used old computers which were mostly fast and new computers which were mostly slow.
* Not sure where I read this argument online, it was a well written post too.
Have a look on ebay. I got my Librebooted Thinkpad T500 for £130 GBP and free postage.
I bought a second-hand Macbook off of Ebay, which was very easy to flash with Libreboot. It can be done with a command line tool, without needing any special hardware. I had probably spent around $200 on it, by the time I bought a new battery and fan, but it's a great machine and runs very well with Trisquel 7 and LXDE. I would recommend it to anyone.
In general though, I agree with the OP. It seems that the real issue for free software these days is not software, but hardware. It seems that we have free-software equivalents for almost everything you might want, but compatible hardware is a very different story. The big problem with hardware is that is requires $$ investment, at a different level to software, and it's hard to see where those $$ are going to come from.
I also have a lot of hopes for EOMA and Power9, which are looking very promising. Hopefully crowdfunding will prove to be a powerful tool to help advance the frontier of free-software-supporting hardware.
1. If you have a laptop yourself you can use the tool "me_cleaner" https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner that reduces drastically the ME code on the firmware and stop it to be executed. It works for most of the modern hardware. Check here for example: https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/issues/3
2. If you don't have a laptop you can find one second hand for almost nothing. And then go back to the point 1
This is my first post on the forum in the english section because i don't trust my english very much.
I think you are right Davide0, the RYF laptops with libreboot are not cheap if you buy them on minifree, vikings, tecnoethical etc, but they are the only computes totally free today, so i think is worth it, also the money are used for help fsf and the libreboot project.
As many already said on this post you can also buy a thinkpad x60 on ebay, if you are from america or UK you can find many of those, they are really cheap and you can flash libreboot by yourself, i bought a thinkpad x200 today for 50 euro, and i'm gonna send it to Vikings for the libreboot installation, but with x60 you can do that by yourself you can find info on the libreboot site, leah and the libreboot project have done a very good job and there are all the informations you need.
Anyway you have a good point, a free computer is hard to find today and thinkpad are not a long time solution, the fault is of course of big manifacturers, they don't care about customers, all they care about is money and i think the situation can only get worse, for this reasons i think is really important to support fsf and libreboot and other projects like these.
About the hardware power, time ago i thinked that the more the hardware is new and fast,the better it is, but that is not necessarly true, if you don' t need to play videogames, or edit video a 2007 thinkpad for now is more than enough, many people use super expensive laptops with 16 GB of RAM and i7 CPU, but let's be honest 80 % of people don't need all that power, a core due and 4 GB of RAM is mooooooore than enough for everyday use.
I hope i'm been usefull.
My english is not that good, i'm sorry for errors i'm trying to improve.
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