Ethical Computing Initiative

Status of Platform Components

This page lists the pieces of the platform needed to reach our goals, their attributes and approximate status.

Overview

Legend:

• ✅ Complete (or nearly), open, respectful
• ✔️ Open choices exist, but need substantial improvement
• ❌ Proprietary, or no feasible open alternative

Hardware

✅ Laptops

We’re in great shape in the laptop department, with a number of good choices:

Why are the chipsets marked, “needs improvement?” Most components (CPU, GPU, NIC) are not open, although that is getting better.  Framework goes the extra mile to ensure parts and even motherboards are replaceable, meaning the case itself could be reused for years. Therefore we rated it “sustainable” as well.

Honorable Mentions: Purism Librem 14, DELL+Linux, MNT Reform (Propeller-hat alert!)

✅ Desktops, Workstations

The desktop situation is in decent shape, though you’ll probably have to purchase a NUC-style (half-cube shape) PC to get open firmware.

Honorable Mentions: System76 Thelio Prime, DELL+Linux

✅ Servers

Servers are in decent shape as well. There are a number of choices although they may come with outdated hardware or have closed firmware.

Honorable Mentions:

• Talos II, darned pricey POWER workstations and servers, due to low volumes.

✅ Tablets

The Starlite in particular is a fantastic, affordable Linux convertible tablet, something we’ve been waiting for, for years!

Honorable Mention: Murena Pixel Tablet; PineTab2, while cheap and open, Pine64 does little in the way of support or product upgrades unfortunately, beware.

✅ Handhelds & Phones

Great news, the Furilabs entry in late 2024 has shaken things up. Considering what the landscape was just a year or two ago, significant progress has been made in the handset department.

So Purism accomplished what it set out to do with the Librem 5, and for that we have to hand it to them (quite grateful) for the first honestly working Linux (non-Android) phone. Did we mention that it actually works? Unfortunately while tolerable, it was years behind performance-wise when it debuted in late 2020. These days it’s about a decade+ behind, and its price has barely budged over that time.

The FuriLabs “FuriPhone” FLX1s (say that three times fast!) is a new Debian-based smartphone. It’s a newer handset and they talk a good game, so we’ll see shortly if it delivers.

The De-Googled Murena Fairphone 6 with a LineageOS fork has nice hardware and looks great. If Android app compatibility is your most important requirement, this is likely the ethical phone for you.

Honorable Mentions:

• GrapheneOS, A “private and secure” de-googled Android OS for installation on (unfortunately) Google Pixel Phones. (Thru the grapevine, we hear there may be new hardware supported soon.)

✅ Routers – “Wireless Freedom” :-D

There are quite a few routers well supported by OpenWRT. But the One below is one we know of that is built specifically “with your right to repair and software freedom in mind.”

Honorable Mentions:

• OpenWRT, is a small Linux operating system targeting embedded devices, most often routers. Installable on many brands, check the site for details.
• Pi-hole, blocks tracking advertisements at the DNS level.
• AdGuard blocks tracking advertisements at the DNS level.

✔️ Game Console, Media Player

💻 Steam Machine
     ✔️ Hardware, Chipset
     ✔️ Repairable, Upgradable
     ✅ OS
     ❌ Firmware (unknown)

“Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it’s still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?”

This is a new entry so some details remain to be seen, but word on the street is that Valve respects its customers, to the extent allowed by game publishers. With the caveat that, it looks like you don’t own the things you “buy” on Steam.

However, this product is still useful in that it brings revenue/investment into the Open/FOSS world that otherwise wouldn’t be made.

❌ Vehicles

The recent history of the automotive industry tells an especially dismal tale for ethical computing. There are sadly no user-respecting choices available in the new car market. None! One needs to dismantle a new car or buy used from before the 2010-era to maintain their dignity. But, a bit of hope recently dropped out of the blue.

Honorable Mentions:

The Slate, and a review: Meet Slate Auto. For the first time in years comes news of Slate Auto, a new manufacturer of modular trucks. Who (believe it or not) may allow their vehicle to leave the assembly line without a built-in infotainment/telemetry/spying system pre-installed at the factory! You can use your own handset or tablet with it as well.

This development is likely to be simply a function of their “blank slate” brand positioning (meaning that you choose only the features you want) rather than ethical concerns driving it. Either way we’ll take it—if and when it arrives, potentially in late 2026. There’s a waiting list.

The Carice roadster/spyder has also made a recent debut. Not entirely sure it is fully disconnected, but it appears so from preliminary information.

✔️ Television

TODO: This is a new section and we don’t know much about what is available yet. Commercial displays exist (for digital signs), and have been recommended however.

Subcomponents

The closed hardware components situation has been disappointing and stagnant for a long time as well. Despite that, we can usually find standard, supported, and documented enough hardware for FOSS drivers to be written. In other words, while not fully respectful of your freedom to tinker, restrictions can generally be worked around.

• ❌ Component firmware is almost always proprietary
• ✔️ ThinkPenguin sells a number of components that are an exception to that. However, some of their hardware is getting long in the tooth, so look closely.

✔️ CPUs, and RISC-V

However, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for CPUs!  RISC-V (pronounced risk-five), is a newish open-source CPU architecture based on RISC design.

Happily, there’s already a slow, working, mediocre PC you can buy with RISC-V right now. Now, “mediocre” may not sound impressive perhaps, but it is a laudable achievement to bring up a whole new computing architecture from nothing to near modern standards (plus porting an operating system and apps) in a dozen years. We expect the next revision will bring it up to the “decent” category as well. The ratified RVA23 standard should help that along.

There are a large number of tech companies and startups jumping on this new open technology, so keep an eye out. Honestly, these companies are most likely and highly motivated to stop paying royalties to ARM (rather than by respect or ethics), but again we’ll take it!

Honorable Mentions:

• SiFive’s HiFive Premier P550, A strange, powerful RISC-V board
• Qualcomm announces first-ever mass-market RISC-V Android SoC

❌ GPUs

The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)—unfortunately an area we won’t see open-standards competitive in for a long time, due to their ever-increasing complexity.

Honorable Mentions:

• Hybrid 3D GPU / CPU / VPU
• RV64X: A Free Open Source GPU for RISC-V, seems dead.
• FuryGPU [2], a guerrilla GPU project, able to do 90s-level graphics.

❌ NICs

“Traditionally, the hardware functions of NICs are built into proprietary application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).”

Not these Network Interface Cards (NICs) however:

• ✔️ TPE-1000MPCIE PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Card
• ✔️ RYF—Wireless Adapters
• NetFPGA

Honorable Mention:

An interesting paper from UCSD on an “open source” NIC called Corundum. Unfortunately it looks to be a bit too high-end, and not meant for consumers.

Others

• List of open-source hardware projects
• Open-source motherboard (not CPU however)

Software

Thankfully we’re in a great situation here, with ethical software of almost every kind freely available. There are still several niches left for uncommon or expensive Windows Apps (and to some extent on MacOS) however, where proprietary software rules the day.

But the present and future look bright in this area. Let’s give a big round of applause and thank you to FOSS communities around the world. 👏

✅ Firmware

Is in great shape thanks to these projects:

• ✅ Coreboot
• ✅ “Das” U-Boot

However, each new piece of system hardware needs part of the firmware ported to it directly, often in C or assembly language. This is due to the low level this code operates at. This makes maintaining compatibility with the large number of devices a challenge.

If one sticks to open hardware vendors (see above), chances are good there will be open firmware available.

✅ Operating System

Though spotty, these are fantastic achievements:

• ✅ Linux—A nickname for a whole Unix-like operating system (OS) distribution composed of FOSS components, typically consisting of:

  • The Linux kernel…
  • systemd—a service initialization and management suite
  • GNU userland utilities
  • A Wayland or X11-based graphical interface, and
  • Compatible applications

• ✅ Android AOSP, via Lineage or Graphene OS, etc

• ✅ BSDs—another group of ethical Unix-like operating systems, popular in some areas. They are typically more cohesive distributions, due to more of the components coming from a single entity.

• ✔️ ReactOS, a FOSS clone of the Windows OS. Useful for running older XP/2003-era software. As older Windows software was more respectful of the user, this may be an acceptable environment for legacy apps. (Note: it still needs work.)

✅ Local Applications

• ✅ Browser and crucial plugins:

  • ✅ Firefox—our last, best hope, for peace.

    An amazing browser, all things considered. Mozilla takes a lot of heat due to the frequent poor decisions of its leadership, multiplied by the essential nature of Firefox. But the bad decisions have (almost) always been able to be worked around.
    We continue to keep an eye out. 👀

    • ✅ Librewolf—just in case, a Firefox fork with safer defaults and improved privacy.

    • ✅ Mullvad Browser—just in case, a Firefox fork with safer defaults and improved privacy.

  • ✔️ Orion Browser—a promising development from Kagi (see below). Apple only for now.

  • ✅ Ublock-Origin—required equipment these days for browsing the web safely.

  • ✅ Privacy Badger—belt and suspenders. Rewrites search engine tracking links and a few other things.

• ✅ Too many applications to list! 🙏

• ✅ Outbound Firewall  ▸▸  OpenSnitch

✔️ Networking, Internet, Cloud

The cloud needs improvement!

• ✅ VPN:

  • Wireguard - Do it yourself (DIY)

  • Mullvad—is a commercial VPN service based in Sweden.—Wikipedia

• ✅ DNS:

  • ✅ Quad9—is a global public recursive DNS resolver that aims to protect users from malware and phishing. Quad9 is operated by a Swiss public-benefit, not-for-profit foundation with the purpose of improving the privacy and cybersecurity of Internet users, headquartered in Zürich.—Wikipedia

  • ✅ Mullvad—is a commercial VPN service based in Sweden.—Wikipedia

• ✅ Video-conferencing:

  • ✅ Jami—a free and open-source telecommunications platform for peer-to-peer and distributed videotelephony, videoconferencing, and voice calls.

  • ✔️ Jitsi—a collection of free and open-source multi-platform voice (VoIP), video conferencing and instant messaging applications.

    Unfortunately Jitsi is now requiring a Google | Microsoft login, ostensibly to combat crime happening on the platform, but this should have been Jitsi accounts instead. Hopefully will be implemented soon.

• ✔️ Search:

  • ✔️ Kagi, a paid, ad-free search engine. Claims to respect your privacy, though we haven’t verified. Said to use Yandex in the background, which could be problematic.

  • ✔️ DuckDuckGo, also claims to not track users, however we have verified (see details below) that they do track which links you’ve clicked. Said to use Bing in the background, which could be problematic.

    Check your browser’s developer tools/network pane for details. Enable log persistence.

    Results depend on whether their main site is used, versus the no-JavaScript site, or the lite site.

    Privacy Badger may rewrite their redirection tracking links in the HTML version, AdGuard may block their telemetry sites called from the JavaScript version.

• ✔️ Cloud Services - There’s not much in this area.

  • OpenCloud

  • ✔️ Cloud Hosting

• ✔️ Local First Applications, at Ink & Switch

  • Awesome Local-First—a curated list of local-first software, resources, and development tools. Local-first software prioritizes data ownership, offline functionality, and synchronization, keeping user data primarily on their devices.