On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 21:16:49 -0800 (PST) "Jason Self" <[email protected]> wrote: > Another problematic point seems their statement that "all new laptop > shipments include Meltdown and Spectre patches, as they will have the > latest PureOS image (that includes the Meltdown patch) preloaded" There are Software patches to mitigate Meltdown and Spectre issues in software like Linux or Firefox based browsers.
As for the microcode, they can ship it to new customers without having to touch PureOS at all. This can be done in Coreboot by selecting "Include CPU microcode in CBFS (Include external microcode header files)" during the compilation. > I realize that, in the FSF's announcement of endorsing PureOS, they > said that it wasn't "a certification of any particular hardware > shipping with PureOS" although some people might buy Purism's > computers thinking that they're getting an FSF-endorsed distro along > with it that doesn't have any proprietary junk when -- by Purism's > own announcement -- they're shipping with it included. I run PureOS on a Thinkpad X200 that runs a 100% free software Coreboot image[1]. There is a PureOS bug tracker where we can report bugs[2], including freedom issues with PureOS. I've already reported 1 freedom issue and I hope it is or will be fixed. I looked for a potential microcode update with "apt search microcode" and found nothing. So this is good news. Like with other FSDG compliant GNU/Linux distributions, there might be some packages that needs to be fixed, and it would be nice to open bug reports on that. I'm personally very interested in PureOS because it's is supposed to be FSDG compliant, and can replace Debian in some cases. I intend to use it to be able to compile Replicant without depending on Debian, to fix one of the FSDG-compliance issues Replicant has. It would be nice if PureOS could run on all architectures that Debian runs on, as we would have an FSDG compliant GNU/Linux distribution that would run on more hardware that can function with only free software. I also didn't find x86 32bit versions of PureOS, which is sad because a lot of Libreboot compatible hardware is still 32bit only. So far we have, as general purpose GNU/Linux distribution: - Parabola that can run on ARM. - Guix that can also run on ARM. Trisquel doesn't run on ARM, and as far as I know we have no easy to use general purpose distribution for ARM. It would also be nice to have more FSDG distributions, for instance I came across Hyperblola[3], which claims to be FSDG compliant. I didn't find it in the official list of FSDG compliant distributions[4]. I also wonder whether all the distributions listed there are maintained and if not, it would make sense to move the unmaintained distributions in another section (like "Historic", "Unmaintained distributions", or if we want new maintainers, "Distributions looking for new maintainers"). References: ----------- [1]Coreboot itself is not entirely free software: The freedom you get depends on the hardware and the build configuration you use. I use hardware and build configuration that doesn't include any nonfree software in the image. [2]https://tracker.pureos.net/tag/freedom-harm_need_nonfree_code/ [3]https://www.hyperbola.info/ [4]https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html Denis.
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