Laptops usually are pre-assembled, since it is tricky to build one yourself out of generic components available in a hardware store; there currently are projects that try to change it, but this article is not about them. Since the laptops usually are pre-assembled, it almost makes sense to sell them with pre-installed operating systems, what became a tradition. After all, it’s easy, makes the laptop operational at once, and there’s a whole Minix complete with backdoors and vulnerabilities right inside CPUs – why not to add a user-usable system on top of that? Though it adds extra cost to install MS Windows, and some users want other systems anyway, so some manufacturers went as far as to install systems such as DOS (in this millenium, that is): not actually usable, but just to install something there.
And so it goes: FSF’s “Respects Your Freedom” computer hardware certification program is generally fine with those Intel backdoors, as long as there’s no way to get rid of them, but demands the rest to be free (libre) software. Well, fine, still making the best out of the situation, but the funny part is ahead. Debian is a rather old, popular, large, and notably libre (no blobs in the kernel, no proprietary software or firmware in the default repositories) GNU/Linux distribution – an obvious default choice, one may think. Not for FSF! Debian wiki mentions how to enable non-free repositories (as if newbie users actually read through the docs: the naive bastards still hope that software would work out of the box), which are even hosted on the same servers as the default ones – apparently contaminating the free software or something. That’s the reason enough for FSF to count Debian as non-free. Meantime, Debian puts GNU documentation into non-free repositories, since, well, they see it as non-free. That’s how largest free software projects do collaborate, without even bringing Linux into the picture.
This way, GNU’s endorsed distributions get restricted mostly to awkward and uncommon ones, and FSF requires those to be installed on computers that want to get a RYF badge and promotion. If the FLOSS-friendly computer manufacturers were a single large entity, we’d probably have them boycotting both FSF and Debian as non-free by now, and using FreeBSD or something – judging by how well these projects get together when they have a reasonable choice.
And finally, Trisquel is one of the things that grew out of it.
It is derived from Ubuntu (which is derived from Debian, as you may know already, and as many other now-abandoned distributions were), sponsored by ThinkPenguin, its most recent release is from 2014-03-11, its security announcements mailing list is silent since 2014, while Trisquel-devel seems to be filled with rather strange messages – although Trisquel-users is active, so apparently it’s still alive, at least in the hearts of its users.
Apart from being a filler system, akin to DOS in that, Trisquel actually tries to follow the FSF spirit and to be nice: apparently it provides some accessibility features, possibly going further than those of Debian and Ubuntu (why would it mention them otherwise?). So the blind kids could get traumatized by the Python backtraces from its Sugar edition just as any others do, using screen readers. Well, probably – I haven’t tried either.
It’s rather ironic how those smaller accessibility-oriented user-friendly distributions can easily require more experience and effort than the more common ones, because you’re mostly on your own if something goes wrong, and the issue is hidden under layers and layers of poorly documented GUI and wrappers, or quite often just lays inside those layers. And it’s rarely debugging-oriented, on top of that. But FSF still prefers to expose new users to that, rather than to a distribution that doesn’t make it hard enough for users to install non-free packages.