this post was submitted on 06 May 2023
19 points (95.2% liked)

Open Source

30414 readers
848 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Basically I want to have a computer to experiment with that is 100% free and open source and that doesn't break the bank. My current idea is to use a RISCV board like the mango pi and use FreeBSD on it. I only use terminal applications expect for the browser so I'm not too worried about performance. But also I have never done anything like this before, this is really just to mess around and learn. But I'm looking for some advice what are the best RISCV boards and is it even worth it? Plus is it even possible to build a 100% free and open source computer with a RISCV board? I am currently doing research into this and this is part of my research lol, thank you.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TWeaK@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

"Fully open source", to me, would imply open source hardware. However basically any device you get these days has a security chip which is a complete black box to the user. Intel have the Intel Management Engine, AMD have their own version and even mobile phones have them too.

You basically have to run Linux on a potato to get fully open source.