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Before I got my Happy Hacking I had both control and escape on caps lock, but with HH, I have no problem using the default escape, which is closer there than on regular keyboards.

I tried Matrix a few months ago, but the clients were pretty horrible compared to irssi. The only functional one was the ugly GUI one with emojis and all that.

I was assuming they have something equivalent to the Intel Management Engine. Do they not?

Isn't any hardware a "potential" hardware backdoor?

I don't know. Is this true of open hardware? I mean, there could be a backdoor, but it would also be practically possible for qualified people to find it, right?

I'm impressed by the (allegedly) tactile and clear keyboard

https://frame.work/blog/the-keyboard

but I'd be delighted to see a happy-hacking style layout, where the arrow keys are consigned to the fn layer (which should be configurable; the whole keyboard could be configurable by qmk). It would also be nice to see an option where the trackpad is replaced by a foldable joystick. Maybe this way one could get rid of the split (arrow) key and the short f keys and the short escape. Think of the vi users.

I recently bought a Wacom tablet, but didn't install any drivers except those that are in the free-software repository of Void Linux, which I suppose don't do this. I wish it were easier in general, though, to find out whether hardware requires proprietary software to function. For example, I'd like to get a document scanner, but, since I don't know of any model that can run on free software, I just do without.

I think there should always be physical off-switches for microphones: it should be possible to know that the thing is not listening. But smartphones also have other private information on them than what can be captured by its microphone.

I don't think the smartphone is inescapable at all, and I don't think any of the conveniences it offers is worth surrendering one's privacy. But there is a tendency in businesses to ignore the fact that some potential customers do not have smartphones. I wonder if legislation against this might be possible.

I flash libreboot first to get rid of the intel management engine and then the latest coreboot to the bios region. I think I configuried it so that it doesn't include any blobs, but I'm not sure. Wish it were easier to tell for non-experts.

The machines that get 5/5, do they have open hardware? I heard somewhere that there's this thing called microcode that resides in the processor and could contain backdoors. Is that taken into account here?