Okay I did some research and I was wrong. There is no confirmation Intel specifically removed the IME from NSA’s PCs. It’s just that some reverse engineers found a flag that supposedly disables it, and their theory is that it was meant for the NSA.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Eureka-The-Intel-Management-Engine-can-finally-be-disabled-thanks-to-the-NSA.245922.0.html

I believe this is the switch System76 and Purism turn off, but as I said, since the blob is still there, we can’t be sure that switch actually works or if it’s just a trap.

Coreboot doesn’t disable the IME by the way. It just gets rid of some of it’s functionality blobs and sends a signal to it telling it to please disable itself. No one knows if that signal actually works. Only Intel themselves can actually fully remove it from a processor, like they did with the processors they sold to the NSA.

I’m not sure they can make them FOSS because they don’t make their desktop motherboards AFAIK. They’re much harder to make than laptop ones.

PSP is not the same thing as IME. Not even close. PSP doesn’t even have network access, much less remote computer control like the IME. Still proprietary, but if OpenSIL allows you to turn it off then we might actually be able to run a fully 100% libre modern desktop computer which is honestly pretty awesome.

This is sadly just true. At least I as an artist could decide to bite the bullet with Clip Studio and learn Krita instead which is not THAT inferior. But to tell a Photoshop professional to switch to GIMP is simply stupid. If only Affinity ported their crap to Linux…

Hopefully with China moving to openKylin, there may be more adoption for the Linux desktop, and it hopefully maybe will incentivize corporations to port their stuff. But for now, yeah.

This is only for laptops by the way. System76 desktop BIOSes are still closed source. It’s such a shame that there’s no FOSS BIOS for desktop PCs, hopefully AMD OpenSIL changes that.

This is very true. As soon as I get a new PC I’ll switch to Debian.

Not that I know of, AMD is also soon going to make their own FOSS bios with OpenSIL so they’re generally the better option if you’re a privacy/libre software junkie.