IMHO, Broadcom is one of the worst companies when it comes to open-source (although perhaps slightly better than NVidia).
The regular Pinephone has a Realtek WiFi. Of course, this Realtek is worse than a freedom-respecting Atheros ath9k AR9462 found at Librem5,
but at least there's an ongoing research for the opensource replacement of Realtek blob which I've seen somewhere, giving some hope for a future liberation.
Meanwhile, there's no such research for Broadcom - because, the first thing any smart (capable-of-reverse-engineering) Linux-loving person does when he accidentally gets a laptop with a Broadcom WiFi preinstalled, is to throw it away and replace it with a card based on a better chip - either an old trusty blobless Atheros, or from another company the binary blob of which doesn't suck as much. But unfortunately you couldn't do this with Pinephone Pro since it's soldered...
The only reason why I'm not considering a Pinephone Pro - is because I would like to avoid Broadcom.
I hope this could be changed for the future generations of Pinephone. Wonder if MiniPCIe card could be fit
The regular Pinephone has a Realtek WiFi. Of course, this Realtek is worse than a freedom-respecting Atheros ath9k AR9462 found at Librem5,
but at least there's an ongoing research for the opensource replacement of Realtek blob which I've seen somewhere, giving some hope for a future liberation.
Meanwhile, there's no such research for Broadcom - because, the first thing any smart (capable-of-reverse-engineering) Linux-loving person does when he accidentally gets a laptop with a Broadcom WiFi preinstalled, is to throw it away and replace it with a card based on a better chip - either an old trusty blobless Atheros, or from another company the binary blob of which doesn't suck as much. But unfortunately you couldn't do this with Pinephone Pro since it's soldered...
The only reason why I'm not considering a Pinephone Pro - is because I would like to avoid Broadcom.
I hope this could be changed for the future generations of Pinephone. Wonder if MiniPCIe card could be fit
