drascus

Ugh okay not my intention at all

This is largely a philosophical question that everyone must answer for themselves. There are a few arguments that can be made and they have all been made many times in the past. Some people will say they define freedom as the ability to use their hardware to it's maximum potential and run any application they want and just have that work. One potential weakness of this argument is that if you take that to it's conclusion the best OS to use would be Windows. Another type of argument could be that freedom means the ability to control, audit, change, and share the software on your machine ( just paraphrasing the four freedoms : https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html ) if this is your view it means the only software that makes sense is fully free software and free OSes. Still another approach that could be taken is that the ideal is fully Free Software but compromise at times for cases of usability and in certain areas where you disagree things should be free. For instance if your computer doesn't work at all then you can't really do much to support the free software movement. In that case you may decide that a OS with some non-free elements is better than nothing. Or maybe you don't think artistic works like Games need be free. There are black and white approaches there are nuanced approaches. I think as long as you are informed and make a decision from a place of being informed no one can really blame you for the decision you come to.

As to the technical limitations there is really no one saying "You can't do that" you can install whatever repo you want to download any package. You could recompile and install a different kernel with the binary blobs if you want. What a system like parabola is doing is saying that they understand their users don't want those things so they are not installed by default. It's not a "You can't do that" it's a "We strongly recommend against you doing this". If you installed a typical distro you could waste weeks trying to remove all the non-free elements. So a distro like Parabola just makes that part frustration free for the people that want it.

This may be true but that doesn't change the fact that they are required to delete someones data on request if they are a resident in California.

context? Who is begging you for money?

That could make sense. However Reddit not deleting his data is a violation of the CCPA if in fact the user is a resident of California. He doesn't have to delete his own data reddit has to delete his data if he requests it.

Thanks I appreciate the feedback. I did my best to make sure I was balanced and tried to solve any issues I ran into. I really hope as things mature things like federation and interoperability between platforms improve. I am happy to see the fediverse get some traction.

The one major gripe some Free Software advocates will have is with the firmware. However there is a question of diminishing returns with some of this stuff. On some level going ultra staunch is more of a philosophical choice than a technical one.

so AMD is likely going to be one of your best bet because they open source their drivers. However YMMV because I don't see that specific card listed, that doesn't mean it won't work but you might have to do some sleuthing to find out for sure. You can always install third party drivers as a compromise until you replace the hardware down the line. I know that's not something anyone wants to do but sometimes that is the only thing you can do.

How much less freedom would one have running Arch with an AMD RX 7900-XT using the free drivers compared to Parabola with any AMD card listed on https://h-node.org/hardware/catalogue/en ?

So that is sort of a philosophical question. I don't think it could be actually quantified with numbers. If you run Arch that will be the standard kernel which has a number of binary blobs by default that are non-free. It also has a repository list that contains non-free packages. These are all things that some advocates frown upon. However if you don't use any of those non-free hardware the binary blobs just sit there and do nothing. If you don't install non-free programs you don't have non-free programs installed. There may be some non-free things installed anyway that your could route out and remove. This is the benefit of a free OS like parabola someone has done all that work for you and they have a linux libre kernel that removes the binary blobs.

There are some people that this just does not work for because of performance, battery life, unsupported hardware etc... Is it better to use a mostly free OS than a proprietary one? Absolutely! is using a completely free OS better than using something like Arch? Likely but you are starting to split hairs at some point. That is just my opinion. Some people are definitely of the attitude that it's free software or nothing which is a completely fine stance to take but it might not work for everyone. More freedom is always better so getting the best system possible with the most freedom you can is still better than using all proprietary.

no it's not. The points he makes are still relevant. If you check the latest stats firefox has lost even more market share since this video was made.

I am not a bot and this is not spam.

Yeah I am with this guy. I am basically willing to die on that hill. The average user does not understand how important the open web is. We are kind of screwed but I don't know what else to do other than use FF and when people ask me tell them to use FF too.

The biggest thing you will run into is the graphics chip and wireless card. You can use this page to find hardware compatible with Linux libre: https://h-node.org/hardware/catalogue/en

The tradeoff is just that much of this is older hardware.