thanks Martin for sharing your experience! your liberating "rant"
comes with some useful insights and a good call I also share

FWIW, what we do at Dyne (thanks to Parazyd who is leading this
activity) is use x220 and x230 refurbished models we buy from another
non-profit foundation in the Netherlands, the price is below 200EUR
each. We then flash them with coreboot ourselves with a bus-pirate
device we bought from Poland. So let's say also shipping is more
sustainable :^)

after that, we experiment a bit, also thanks to the BIOS whitelisting
removal after corebooting. Parazyd has the FHD MOD by Nitrocaster
which he used to convert his laptop to a gorgeous full HD screen,
something I'm going to try myself. I am very upset about broadcoom or
intel wifi cards so my first move is to slap an Atheros in there. Not
counting the time invested for these mods (which sincerely is FUN time
for us) the overall cost of such devices is below 400EUR and we
fulfill also one core mission of Dyne.org foundation: to respect the
environment and recycle whenever possible rather than consume new HW.
Plus we end up having a lot of spare parts for friends who do the same
and for ourselves when something breaks. I think we'll keep this way,
hoping folks at Lenovo don't keep ruining the x2 models as they are
doing from the x230 onwards....

> Another option would be to look in ARM space, or try to free up a used Google
> Pixel notebook that already has Coreboot.

yes. and we have Devuan images ready to run on many chromebooks already...

only problem is the hardware is not ideal on those: no way to change
SSDs, RAM etc. not enough modularity, what makes great the thinkpad
x2 series

> So regarding Puri.sm, Fairphone and others… I vote for the benefit
> of doubt. Do they provide perfectly free and fair solutions yet? No
> way. Will they succeed doing so? Certainly not if people do not buy
> their stuff.

I agree with this. I know personally people at Fairphone here in
Amsterdam and they are sincerely good willing and passionate about
their mission. They are definitely doing their best, which is not
enough, but is something. I'm also aware of less mainstream
initiatives that have achieved even more, with less. All these
initiatives can be improved and I believe would benefit much more from
less competition and a more cooperative approach. But inevitably when
they are lead by marketing-minded people, this doesn't happens.

> A Devuan for hardware… just for hardware the necessary investment is
> that much higher. It is challenging and it has a high risk
> associated with it. So kudos for any players in the market that have
> the courage to tackle the challenge to facilitate change. Even when
> it is in small steps.

Totally agree. I hope many more people to many more small steps.

like the EOMA68 for instance, which ships with Devuan pre-installed,
perhaps worth mentioning here, and has a very modular open-hw approach

https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop


as for the "petition" for better hardware, I hope the FSF invests much
more energy into https://h-node.org which is an initiative with
enormous potential if campaigned succesfully into the consumer market,
to make people aware of what can be supported by GNU/Linux and
customised and efficiently recycled and what not. So far it seems
stalled and pretty much a niche initiative to me.


ciao