Is there any good low-hassle freedom-respecting reasonable price reasonable performance computer platform for running Debian these days? My main computers (desktop and laptop) are due for a planned refresh (like, for once, not refreshing in urgency because they broke). The more free-as-in-freedom, the better, but also it has to _work_ and not get in the way "too much". I don't particularly enjoy hardware tinkering, I want to concentrate on software, thank you very much. Let's say the least non-free firmware possible; I suppose at this point I can't hope for free hardware.
I've got a sour taste with the offering of amd64-based systems; the Intel-based ones have the Management Engine deeply embedded (efforts of the likes of puri.sm and system76 to battle that notwithstanding), I hear the AMD ones have something similar now. From what I can gather, there are only out-of-production mainboards, (ASUS KCMA-D8 and ASUS KGPE-D16), and the CPUs themselves are and... it they are also out of production. Even though it is all available "refurbished" and/or second-hand, this feels like a dead end. For laptops... refurbished Lenovo machines. I kinda "know" AMD (ex-ATI) graphic cards are supposed to work better than NVidia ones with free drivers, but each time I emergency-replaced my amd64 motherboard, the shop was all "nope, I can get you NVidia in a few days, but no stock of ATI/AMD at suppliers"... so I've been each time running the oldest NVidia card I could find, and the nouveau driver feature matrix https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html is depressing... I don't really care about most features, but let's say I want accelerated video, dual head (RandR) to run my two nice monitors at 1440x2560 resolution. Which requires two HDMI (1.3), DisplayPort or USB-C outputs. Don't care much about 3D really. I'm willing to pay some price premium for a free platform, but not an order of magnitude more. I'd like ECC memory... at least on my desktop? I'd like it to "feel" like an upgrade also in performance to what I'm running now, hopefully that will be really easy given the age of my machines, namely a desktop with an Intel Xeon E3-1271 v3 (released in 2014) and a ThinkPad X200s with an Intel Core 2 Duo L9400 (released in 2008). I also kinda hope for something rather quiet, too, I've been developing increasing tinnitus and I already wear noise-cancelling headphones when next to my desktop :-| It seems the only serious contenders, available new, with a future, would be Power and ARM? In the Power realm, I'm aware only of the Raptor series, starting with the "Blackbird" which even seems to be available from a European seller now, namely vikings.net? On the other hand, I read that Firefox WebRTC is broken on Power https://www.talospace.com/2023/02/firefox-110-on-power.html the Debian package fails to build... for two months now (since 109.0-1). I mean, I don't mind using firefox-esr (that's what I use anyway), but that could be a hint that my desktop experience will be miserable? Also, I also "see" rumours online that Raptor is not doing going up to Power10, so it that a dead end in practical terms over the next years? On the ARM side, ... I don't know anything for desktops. Is something around? The Power/Talos afficionados say modern/recent ARM systems also has freedom problems, but I haven't seen them articulate what. What about that? As far as laptops are concerned... Anyone has good recommendations? The Pinebook Pro order page says "don't order if you are seeking a substitute for your X86 laptop" (???) and I've recently stumbled upon the MNT Reform. Thare are the Apple machines, but it looks like getting GNU/Linux to run on them is a lot of reverse engineering with no good documentation/support from the manufacturer (I mean, kuddos to the ones doing it, but if I could avoid supporting that kind of non-cooperation with my money...), that basic-to-moderate hardware features are still not ready upstream (much less in Debian soon-to-be-stable testing out of the box...), and replacing a Microsoft tax with an Apple tax... not sure that's an improvement? Thanks in advance for your advice, -- Lionel
