4 ms·

Well people have already made decently fast homebrew computers with FPGAs. The problems are threefold: - To what extent do you interop with existing (closed?)

Well people have already made decently fast homebrew computers with FPGAs. The problems are threefold: - To what extent do you interop with existing (closed?) hardware, vs trying to recreate the world from scratch. Do you implement usb, pcie, etc, or do you make your own philosophically free equivalent that isn't compatible with existing devices? - In any case you will have to cope with the fact that homebrew CPUs will always be a decade or two behind the cutting edge intel/amd cpus in terms of performance - Your system has to be useful in order to get people to use it, but it has to have people working on it consistently in order for it to get to a state where it's useful. A chicken and egg problem. There is, however, at least one off-the-shelf free computer system - I'm thinking of the Raptor Talos platform. But even then, you're paying significantly more for a computer that performs worse, unless you're running supercomputer-esque workloads on your desktop PC

novok 5y ago
Personally I think the practical solution is companies like frame.work & valve making open hardware and creating software shims like proton because it's part of their value prop and business model to make open hardware. If valve doesn't make Linux a viable gaming platform, they are going to be chess maneuvered into a checkmate by MSFT and Apple. Epic recognizes a similar issue too which is why even if they are competitors, they recognize the greater threat and are working together somewhat with Epic porting EAC to Linux & proton.
- voldacar 5y ago
  > I think the practical solution is companies like frame.work & valve making open hardware and creating software shims like proton Right. I admire them certainly, and I'm thinking about getting a framework laptop myself, but we shouldn't really call their products free/open hardware because they use backdoored CPUs from Intel/AMD
  - novok 5y ago
    They are not currently, because they are forced by current reality to use things like that. But they create the market demand to make open CPUs in the first place. If you become a big enough customer, Intel and AMD start becoming interested in making open versions of their firmware or CPUs, like they do with game consoles today, making custom models just for them. Framework is already interested in making an ARM laptop for example too, and I could foresee them getting AMD to make an open firmware version their CPUs just for the high assurance / open hardware segment that is starting to get created by valve and framework. Create market demand, and companies start providing market solutions.

novok 5y ago

Personally I think the practical solution is companies like frame.work & valve making open hardware and creating software shims like proton because it's part of their value prop and business model to make open hardware. If valve doesn't make Linux a viable gaming platform, they are going to be chess maneuvered into a checkmate by MSFT and Apple. Epic recognizes a similar issue too which is why even if they are competitors, they recognize the greater threat and are working together somewhat with Epic porting EAC to Linux & proton.

voldacar 5y ago
> I think the practical solution is companies like frame.work & valve making open hardware and creating software shims like proton Right. I admire them certainly, and I'm thinking about getting a framework laptop myself, but we shouldn't really call their products free/open hardware because they use backdoored CPUs from Intel/AMD
- novok 5y ago
  They are not currently, because they are forced by current reality to use things like that. But they create the market demand to make open CPUs in the first place. If you become a big enough customer, Intel and AMD start becoming interested in making open versions of their firmware or CPUs, like they do with game consoles today, making custom models just for them. Framework is already interested in making an ARM laptop for example too, and I could foresee them getting AMD to make an open firmware version their CPUs just for the high assurance / open hardware segment that is starting to get created by valve and framework. Create market demand, and companies start providing market solutions.