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Comment by whoisburbansky | Hacker News Reader

Are you implying they’re going to stop you from popping Ubuntu on it somehow?

[Edit: Thanks for all the replies citing driver blobs and proprietary BIOS issues, totally slipped my mind that that was a concern, makes a ton more sense now.]

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They may be wondering if the BIOS is FOSS.

E.g. LibreBoot https://libreboot.org/

> Non-free BIOS/UEFI firmware often contains backdoors, can be slow and have severe bugs. Development and support can be abandoned at any time.

Ubuntu runs also on proprietary drivers. If the hardware vendor stops to maintain the proprietary driver or binary blob the hardware could become obsolete very quickly, although it runs fine hardware wise. My 11yr old Nokia N900 runs absolutely fine hardware wise. It also could run a new linux kernel, but some drivers are proprietary and can not be updated. What a waste.

He is just asking if it can reach the same level in terms of freedom as the laptops listed here: https://ryf.fsf.org/categories/laptops

Ah, that makes sense, I’d totally forgotten about proprietary driver blobs/BIOS issues.

I think he is referring to proprietary firmware/driver blobs that come with many CPUs and GPUs. Purism has focused on this issue and provide fully FOSS hardware [1].

1. https://puri.sm/learn/blobs/

Idk bro the cpu microcode from intel is closed source. How can you live with that

</s>

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