Yes, you're right. XFCE has a dependency on libpulse0 but that only recommends pulseaudio itself. The GNOME desktop has a hard PA dependency though, perhaps unsurprisingly. No need to remove it anyway: just stop it from starting if you don't want it, as noted by dxrobertson earlier in this thread.

My point was that all the standard desktop environments include PA even if it's as a recommended component rather than a dependency per se.

I agree with you that X86 standard is versatile and open for vendors to produce X86 hardware, but is the most unfriendly for people who would like to write their own open source boot loader, that is what I primary meant under open source.

ToxicExMachina wrote:

different MIPS cores

Can routers running LibreCMC be treated more secure in terms of my control over their boot loader?

ToxicExMachina wrote:

If you want REALLY opensource board - find one with RISC-V CPU based on opensource core, and vendor must provide full docs under libre license. You can also try to flash FPGA.

\o/   RISC-V   \o/

And there is the J-Core Open Processor.
—▶ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0milqmt4ao

I think we need to keep an eye on this one too...

ToxicExMachina wrote:

I would recommend to search for NXP i.MX based boards. However, in general ARM is just a pain. x86 based boards are much more "open source" than any ARM based board.

Please explain how X86 is more open source than ARM?

ARM is almost a pure hardware RISC processor executing supplied instructions directly on its hardware at once.

But X86 is a virtual machine like a Bochs X86 VM generally run on a very high performance hardware RISC processor for which we do not have any documentation at all, look at VIA C3 as an example,

Intel and AMD are the same idea but significantly more optimized for high performance.

Even modern Intel and AMD processors are "RISC" under the hood - they decompose CISC x86 instructions into RISC micro-ops, this isn't a VIA phenomenon

Everything is TOP secret about X86 CPUs actual hardware internals, its hardware implementation, its native RISC like assembly instructions, implementation of X86 virtual machine and backdoors injected into this VM yet on the factory and even BIOS initialization procedure at the very beginning of the boot time has so little documentation that only a few boards have unofficial Libreboot firmware for them from hackers who somehow reversed BIOS fragments and/or schematics and initialization sequences.

A few more boards have been made compatible with Coreboot and the most of them are too old and most likely some docs just leaked from laboratories to help coreboot developers to reverse engineer the boards boot process (initialization of RAM modules, etc.).

And ARM initialization process is almost completely open source for some boards, though a few code is still unknown too which is executed before uboot just after getting a reset signal. Can it include some trojan running in a TrustZone isolated and undetectable from OS, may be, who knows.

Uboot needs to be customized for each board, but a few boards have it open source even officially.
For a few boards like AllWinner A20 we have all software parts open source: Uboot unlike proprietary BIOS or UEFI for X86 and even mainline Linux kernel like for X86, even open source 3D driver is being under development and already works.

X86 looks very versatile, has outstanding performance, compatibility with huge amount of add on parts, with fully open source OSes like Linux and BSD supported forever, tens of years after hardware release, it  still can run the most recent modern up to date OSes like BSD. For example the most up to date BSD 2019 at least in text mode still runs fine on 20 years old Pentium 1/2 1997 and even X works well enough if the board has enough RAM like 200-300 Mbytes.

X86 completely hides its initialization code and most likely virtualization spying invisible trojans in negative and/or zero rings of CPU booted before any OS code and fully undetectable from OS level.

I am wondering if there is also an easy upgrade program for switching kernel for Debian/Devuan as on Ubuntu