I discovered seven or eight months ago that if you make it known that you're poor, and wait long enough, someone will eventually just give you one, and you don't have to make the decision yourself.
I'm quite interested in the Purism Librem. I'd have to try the Trisquel Gnu/Linux first to be sure I could work with it. https://trisquel.info/ Any advice on that for a non-techy? I've used Ubuntu before, mostly got on with it.
Get your little pokey tool in my precision screwdriver set, put in the USB stick, press the hidden novo button boot into BIOS turn off UEFI and enable legacy boot from USB stick done in 15 minutes.
SPARC is RISC yes, a nice instruction set with register windows for fast call and return structures. Very fast and precise FPU. A deep register file on both, yep....
EOMA68 should comply with most of the ideals you mentioned. The only issues would probably be (unknown) delay before delivery and somewhat poor performance, at least until a new card becomes available. The project looks very promising, though.
For libre BIOS replacement on ready-to-go hardware, take a look at computers with Libreboot. Technoethical sells a modified Thinkpad X200 in Europe; so did Minifree in UK, but now their focus is on liberating the X220 (which has newer and more powerful hardware), so perhaps keep an eye on that.
@Michael_MD The cool thing about Linux is that one can take out a hard disk, do a fresh install on another laptop, and then put the disk back and be happy. With Sata disks this is even much easier than with the old IDE disks, since the 2.5" Sata also fits with cables uses in a desktop machine with 3.5" Sata disks :)
I'd need to know more about the machine to assist but likely you need to hold a function key or other button down to break the boot sequence into the BIOS screens....
We can figure that out if you want I can help you.
I've had some bios problems like you describe, where the hard disk would boot, regardless of the bios settings. i think a low-level reformat of the drive might do the trick, so that when the bios cannot find the OS on the harddrive it will look to the CD.
