Coreboot vs. Libreboot

Not at all! Check out “proprietary components status”:

https://www.coreboot.org/Board:purism/librem13

I would also recommend Debian or Devuan (runs only on older hardware due to its dated Kernel) to the OT.

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Right. Coreboot is not completely libre because it relay on proprietary firmware. Otherwise, they would ship Libreboot, not Coreboot. In the case of Purism, the blob they require is stripped and trimmed to me minimum, and Intel ME (a huge backdoor) is neutralized and disabled, as a result. More info is on the above linked blog post of the developer that ported CB to the Librem 13.
Thank you for the correction! :slight_smile:

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Sorry, but, unfortunately, I think I have to correct you again.

Afaik, coreboot itself is libre and does not rely on any proprietary software. It is just that some devices like the Librem 13 need this proprietary components, coreboot itself does not.

Now, how can you tell/claim that the ME is “neutralized and disabled” if you don’t know what the remaining code is doing? According to the blog post, there is still 120k of binaries left. In the beginning, the Purism people claimed to have produced a libre notebook which they did not. Now, after the public got to know that this was simply a lie, they made some effort to port coreboot to the device and “neutralized” the ME - but nobody knows what is left. Personally, I recommend to avoid vendors that behave like that.

In general, stripping down a blob like the ME is dangerous and so far nobody can tell what effects this has. There is a definitely the risk here, that some security-wise important methods/component could have been removed, leaving the ME in a far more insecure state than initial. If you want to know more, checkout the archives of the coreboot mailing list of the last months, there have been various discussions going on about this.

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Oh, c’mon. Coreboot = Coreboot implementations, obviously. Android is libre too, but it require proprietary components in the real world.
About the ME thing, read the developer’s posts, and keep in mind that Purism actively support the thing for security and issues —it’s their responsibility. I won’t talk more about these things here (although I’m absolutely not saying you don’t have some points), because we were initially talking about recommended OSes.

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