It’s not just about the inconvenience though. Windows is paid. It’s at least 100 bucks. It’s not even “free but you are the product” like Google drive or whatever. Yet it still abuses you, controls you and exploits you, and you have to do tons of workarounds for it to not get in your way. Most of them are always temporary, as a new update reenables everything again or directly circumvents the workaround you used.

If you are locked into the ecosystem, then I do agree that it’s annoying that people think moving to Linux is seamless. It wasn’t for me, it even cost me money since I had to buy an AMD gpu for things to work well + another GPU to passthrough to a windows VM and still use Clip Studio. But if someone only uses their computer for things that can be done seamlessly on Linux, and they genuinely dislike and are against all the bullshit Windows always does, it’s worth it to tell them there is a viable alternative, and what they heard about “you have to use the command line for everything meaningful!” or “everything breaks all the time!” hasn’t been true for years.

If you hate being used by Windows so much, you really should try an alternative, unless you’re a professional that uses software that just can’t run on Linux at all, chances are you can get most of what you use a computer for working fine. In return you get freedom, privacy, choice, performance.

Or if you hate it but are too reluctant to change for whatever reason, that’s totally fine, but just say that. Don’t spread misinformation about Linux.

It’s worth it to be FOSS to take three weeks to get your Arch install just the way you like it.

Literally no one ever says this. Just use Fedora. Almost completely seamless. There’s a KDE version if you want to have the same workflow as windows without configuring anything. You don’t have to use firefox, brave or ungoogled chromium are FOSS too.

Okay I did some research and I was wrong. There is no confirmation Intel specifically removed the IME from NSA’s PCs. It’s just that some reverse engineers found a flag that supposedly disables it, and their theory is that it was meant for the NSA.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Eureka-The-Intel-Management-Engine-can-finally-be-disabled-thanks-to-the-NSA.245922.0.html

I believe this is the switch System76 and Purism turn off, but as I said, since the blob is still there, we can’t be sure that switch actually works or if it’s just a trap.

Coreboot doesn’t disable the IME by the way. It just gets rid of some of it’s functionality blobs and sends a signal to it telling it to please disable itself. No one knows if that signal actually works. Only Intel themselves can actually fully remove it from a processor, like they did with the processors they sold to the NSA.

I’m not sure they can make them FOSS because they don’t make their desktop motherboards AFAIK. They’re much harder to make than laptop ones.

PSP is not the same thing as IME. Not even close. PSP doesn’t even have network access, much less remote computer control like the IME. Still proprietary, but if OpenSIL allows you to turn it off then we might actually be able to run a fully 100% libre modern desktop computer which is honestly pretty awesome.

This is sadly just true. At least I as an artist could decide to bite the bullet with Clip Studio and learn Krita instead which is not THAT inferior. But to tell a Photoshop professional to switch to GIMP is simply stupid. If only Affinity ported their crap to Linux…

Hopefully with China moving to openKylin, there may be more adoption for the Linux desktop, and it hopefully maybe will incentivize corporations to port their stuff. But for now, yeah.

This is only for laptops by the way. System76 desktop BIOSes are still closed source. It’s such a shame that there’s no FOSS BIOS for desktop PCs, hopefully AMD OpenSIL changes that.

This is very true. As soon as I get a new PC I’ll switch to Debian.

Not that I know of, AMD is also soon going to make their own FOSS bios with OpenSIL so they’re generally the better option if you’re a privacy/libre software junkie.