Something close to what you have in mind is the Novena built by Bunnie Huang (if you haven't heard of him, he's a reputed guy in the DIY electronics and reverse

Something close to what you have in mind is the Novena built by Bunnie Huang (if you haven't heard of him, he's a reputed guy in the DIY electronics and reverse engg space). There are extensive hardware and engineering details about it in his blogs[1] and wiki[2]. Ben Heck did a 3-part video series actually building one[3]. You might find all three links useful for the hardware and build aspects. Pinebook is another laptop-friendly board [4]. One difference I can think of is that x86 architectures tend to be modular and standardized. You can look at any x86 laptop PCB and guess the buses and standards being used between components like CPU, chipset, RAM, GPU, and peripherals. In contrast, every ARM vendor seems to have its own proprietary architecture and everything - even the GPU - is hidden inside a single system-on-chip. This is one reason for those blobs - only the vendor knows how to interface to those internal details. Another difference I've noticed is that popular peripheral interfaces like SATA and PCIe are rare in the ARM world. Some Odroid boards support SATA hard disks, but I have not come across any popular board that supports PCIe. ARM boards tend to use flash or eMMC - performance is always better with eMMC. If you want an x86 like experience, go with a board that supports atleast eMMC if not SATA. An entirely different approach may be looking into ARM server architectures. I don't know anything about them, but I'd expect them to be a lot more standardized than embedded boards. If I were doing this for myself and didn't want a Novena, I'd buy an existing pre-built board like Odroid or i.MX6 board and build a laptop body around it. I can't think of any good approach for blob-free, except tedious reverse engineering. [1]: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=novena https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?tag=novena [2]: https://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page https://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Novena_Main_Page [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaOP1orfeqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaOP1orfeqI [4]: http://wiki.pine64.org http://wiki.pine64.org