> Another suggestion for Thinkpenguin would be to make more hardware > available. Surely there is more than one printer around which supports > GNU/Linux well. I have the DeskJet D1560 from HP and it works very > well, a lot of HP stuff works well as a rule of thumb.
I think the availability of supported hardware is not the problem here. Using a Lexmark printer and a Canon scanner, both work with free software (found the scanner on h-node.org, bought the printer years before using free distros; unsure if the scanner buttons are supported in drivers, found no packaged software to use them in distro I use). > Also, I don't see any scanners, just one All-in-one device with > fax. Better pictures would be neat too. It really amazes me, how > webshops which support free software or any distribution in general > very often have poor quality pictures or no pictures at all. The same observations (except that shops without any indication of free software support also have not enough pictures). > According the players, I'm pretty sure Thinkpenguin won't sell > anything that uses non-free software at any level. Those players > either run some sort of free firmware or can be upgraded with > Rockbox. That's my guess though. Another reason to show manufacturer model numbers (or, like sysmocom, a long list of models that any of them might be sold, if it's not a single model) like the ones listed on free firmware websites. All computers sold by ThinkPenguin have nonfree BIOS, wouldn't consider their devices to not include nonfree software "by default" unless explicitly mentioned. Lack of free printer firmware (running on the device) is a problem with important privacy issues like yellow dots [0] (unsure if it would protect users from vendors preventing the use of cheaper ink of other manufacturers). I believe it's good that the similar problem of nonfree BIOS is widely discussed even though it's not solved in most cases, this probably also needs a bigger awareness. [0] https://www.eff.org/issues/printers
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