08-24-2022, 02:06 AM
Quote: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.
The Librem 5 ships with a Redpine Signals RS9116 chip, which uses a lot of power and gets quite hot occasionally. It also requires some (I‘d assume proprietary) firmware, too: https://source.puri.sm/angus.ainslie/fir...new-readme
The state of fully free WiFi chips that can be connected in embedded devices (meaning not via PCIe or USB, but via technologies like SDIO) is sadly very disheartening - afaik there is actually no option (which is why PINE64 started that Nutcracker challenge).
Regarding the PinePhone Pro: To me, Realtek and Broadcom are both bad and possible security risks, but not enough so that I go the inconvenient route and don’t use them.. For most people, the chip in the PinePhone Pro is an improvement though, since it works better. If you really dislike this, you can always go ahead and flip that kill-switch and then use a USB device you feel comfortable with, e.g., an Atheros AR9271 or AR7010 USB dongle, like the replicant people advise for their Libre Android devices.
