On 10.10.2017 01:54, Youness Alaoui wrote:
On Sun, Oct 8, 2017 at 6:15 PM, Taiidan@gmx.com Taiidan@gmx.com wrote:
(I also am looking at system76 and Purism but I am bit leery of spending a lot with a small / new company - comments appreciated)
Purism dishonestly markets their products - while they claim that their laptops "respect freedom and privacy" their version of coreboot is nothing more than a wrapper layer for intel FSP (binary blob that does all the hardware init) which is next to pointless for the amount of money you would spend on one as all it does is move trust from vendor to OEM not avoiding the hypothetical OEM firmware backdoors.
System76 is a fine choice if all you want is a laptop that runs linux without difficulty.
I don't get why you constantly try to discredit Purism and insult everything we do. You complain about coreboot being "useless" because it uses FSP, but you fail to mention that anything using coreboot will use the FSP unless it's 10 year old hardware (Sandybridge is the latest FSP-free supported CPU).
Please keep the dimension right, newest is Ivy Bridge and that is 5 years old.
The original email asked about a coreboot port, not a libreboot port. Every time I see purism mentioned, you have to jump in to insult and dishonestly say that Purism is dishonest. If you want to claim bullshit like that, at least find something real and concrete to back it up. I've ignored you many times, but I'm fed up of your one-man vendetta against Purism. What happened to you for you to have so much hate against us?
It's not him alone, you might remember our discussion about it (it ended with you writing poems that I didn't even had the time to read in the end, please don't do that again).
Extremely funny how you then say that System76 is "a fine choice" considering that System76 doesn't even come with coreboot, and even if it did come with coreboot, it would of course, still depend on the FSP. Also, System76 hardware depends on components which do require binary blobs, as opposed to Purism laptops, so I don't get why System76 is "a fine choice" if Purism isn't.
It's pretty simple, System76 seems to advertise what say sell, Purism doesn't. I'd say they do most things right, but not the advertisement. Most Linux supporting vendors are honest about their products. Yet, Purism makes claims such as:
"Only by selecting each and every chip in our Librem laptops can we guarantee your privacy, security and freedom are protected."
Where I still argue, it's the opposite with Intel inside.
Everything else, they seem to do alright. I'd fully support them if they'd stop the false advertisement of being super secure. They are not, just a little better than the rest (by hardware design, don't know about the details of their software and how secure the hard- ware is configured).
So my conclusion, Purism draws customers from other Linux supporting vendors with dishonest marketing. If that doesn't bother you, fine. But please don't get angry if it bothers honest people.
Nico
While I understand your frustration, and agree with the general thrust of your email, and disregarding the "10 years", the Samsung Chromebook Plus (and many other devices of similar age) beg to differ. There are devices from 2016 and 2017 shipping with coreboot and no CPU level blobs in the firmware (the only CPU side blob would be the kernel's GPU driver).
Sorry, I'm so deep into Intel stuff right now that I completely missed the possibility of non-x86 hardware. Yes, there is newer hardware with no blobs in coreboot, my statement is only true for intel-related hardware. I don't even know about AMD actually, but I believe it's a similar situation for AMD. But in the case of the Chromebook Plus, I checked, and it's an ARM based CPU, which is why coreboot is blob free for it. The original post was about a laptop to run virtual machines, so I assume x86 is a requirement, but my statement was about coreboot itself, not about the laptop requirement, which made it false. Thanks for the correction!
Please keep the dimension right, newest is Ivy Bridge and that is 5 years old.
My bad, you're right. The '10 years old' was in reference to ME-less CPU designs and I confused it with FSP-less coreboot. As for the ivybridge being the newest, that's again my bad, I used this to look up when the native intel raminit stopped being supported ; https://www.coreboot.org/Intel_Native_Raminit#Sandybridge.2FIvybridge and it said sandybridge/ivybridge, and I thought they were the same, not one being successor of the other.
I guess that will teach me to email while I'm tired and busy/distracted.
The original email asked about a coreboot port, not a libreboot port. Every time I see purism mentioned, you have to jump in to insult and dishonestly say that Purism is dishonest. If you want to claim bullshit like that, at least find something real and concrete to back it up. I've ignored you many times, but I'm fed up of your one-man vendetta against Purism. What happened to you for you to have so much hate against us?
It's not him alone, you might remember our discussion about it (it ended with you writing poems that I didn't even had the time to read in the end, please don't do that again).
You're not hateful from what I could see. You disagree with Purism and you don't like it, but I haven't seen you jumping at every occasion to talk bad about it. As for our last discussion, that's what it was, a discussion, which unfortunately, I got a little over-verbose in my last response and killed the discussion, but I don't feel like Taiidan wants to discuss anything. Either way, I don't plan on opening any new discussions about Purism here.
Extremely funny how you then say that System76 is "a fine choice" considering that System76 doesn't even come with coreboot, and even if it did come with coreboot, it would of course, still depend on the FSP. Also, System76 hardware depends on components which do require binary blobs, as opposed to Purism laptops, so I don't get why System76 is "a fine choice" if Purism isn't.
It's pretty simple, System76 seems to advertise what say sell, Purism doesn't. I'd say they do most things right, but not the advertisement. Most Linux supporting vendors are honest about their products. Yet, Purism makes claims such as:
"Only by selecting each and every chip in our Librem laptops can we guarantee your privacy, security and freedom are protected."
Where I still argue, it's the opposite with Intel inside.
Everything else, they seem to do alright. I'd fully support them if they'd stop the false advertisement of being super secure. They are not, just a little better than the rest (by hardware design, don't know about the details of their software and how secure the hard- ware is configured).
So my conclusion, Purism draws customers from other Linux supporting vendors with dishonest marketing. If that doesn't bother you, fine. But please don't get angry if it bothers honest people.
I disagree with your statement that it's false advertisement and that it's dishonest marketing. I won't explain why I think you're wrong here, because : 1 - I already explained it in length in my previous long email that you never read 2 - It doesn't market itself as "being super secure" as you said, but rather as being "security and privacy focused", which it is. You are free to find anywhere on the website where it says security or privacy without stating "a focus on" or "<attribute>-focused" along with it. 2 - It's my opinion/interpretation and you have a different one, and that's fine, you are entitled to it. Your view/interpretation of a statement does not mean everyone needs to see it your way and that the conclusion that it's being dishonest which your drew from it, is going to be the absolute truth. 3 - By stating that it "bothers honest people", right after saying that it doesn't bother me, you're implying that I'm not an honest person (at least that's how I read it) and that kind of statement doesn't lead to cool headed discussions, so I'll simply withdraw from this one.
... Yeay, looks like I managed to not write another long email.
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Nico Huber -
Youness Alaoui