As far as 3D goes the situation is not perfect. Like the LibreBoot laptops
there are components which are not fully supported. There are no proprietary
bits needed to boot however and the desktop environment doesn't require it.
There is some hardware acceleration though so you can watch videos and
similar. Even though I've been involved in the discussions with the FSF on
this it's a little foggy in my head as to the details. We had a working
demonstration of a test desktop environment running on Parabola Linux-libre
at a recent event. It works.
The main thing though is not the Computer Card or whether there is any
support for graphics components- or even free software. The main thing here
is we have a standard and laptop/desktop housing design that solves the
underlying problems. The problem is we have little to no control over the
design of components and boards.
We have had little to no control over upstream companies doing design of
critical components or even what components end up in these designs (wifi,
CPUs, graphics, etc). If we can't or can't easily get code from upstream nor
swap these components it becomes an impossible task to design a free software
friendly device. More and more is getting integrated into SOCs or being
soldered down on the boards themselves.
If this succeeds we will for the first time have a real chance at fixing
long-term critical and long-standing non-free software issues. In the past
Intel and AMD have been uncooperative in certain areas and the situation was
such that we were just stuck. With this design and standard we can swap
components more easily and work around uncooperative companies for which we
were previously dependant.
Ultimately these housing designs and standards open doors and give us options
that we didn't have before. There are valid criticisms here and I'm far from
completely happy myself. What is important here is we will have a means to
solving these problems long term as long as the Crowd Funding campaign
succeeds. The majority of the work here is done. We funded that much. What
isn't done is proving that there is sufficient demand for libre-friendly
hardware. If there is not evidence of sufficient demand from this Crowd
Funding campaign it won't matter that we solved the problem on paper. Right
now it is far from certain that there will be enough demand. Fortunately we
only need about $150,000 USD for the first run or about 250 sales. Further
out we'll have to hit much higher numbers.
