The ideal laptop in my dreams is running pure Debian on a RISC-V CPU, and all firmware from BIOS/EFI to peripheral devices has the source code available with a license which allows the free-software community to maintain it and remove undesired features.
Unfortunately, even though we are getting closer every year, we do not have such hardware yet for the greater market for a reasonable price. If you want to run an Intel- or AMD-based laptop, you have no choice but to run their firmware, BIOS, EFI, microcode etc. More firmware is required for video and network devices. Unfortunately, you cannot run much of it without proprietary firmware, no matter if that firmware is on the Debian CD or not. Please note that firmware is something different than drivers. The best option that I see at the moment with commodity hardware is to buy hardware which does not require proprietary drivers. So at least the main CPU and memory is free from undesired code. This is much easier today then it used to be. I run my primary workstations without any proprietary driver, application or library for years. I really feel with you. I really wish there were more options without proprietary firmware. But I not see any options. The POWER9-based Raptor systems are advertised with free firmware, but they use AMD video cards and Broadcom Ethernet. So I think that what they mean by free firmware only applies to the BIOS/EFI. The coreboot and libreboot projects also need some blobs for Intel and AMD based systems. Microcode is fortunately a thing of the past. It is an idea from the 1960's CISC design which is uncommon and unnecessary for RISC processors. So the most important goal is to get develop laptop with free EFI and free video firmware. Regards Stephan
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