Re: Purism isn't quite what it says on the tin
Happy to oblige, for what it's worth.
Some relevant background, I've been a staunch Linux user for well over two decades, and already moved my PC games to a separate system some years back as I refused to trust Steam with my personal information. I was also using an old AMD true open firmware PC (KCMA-D8) before moving over to the Talos II, back when coreboot meant open source not a build system around Management Engine and FSP binaries.
The best way I can describe it is that it feels just like a normal PC, other than it takes a really long time to boot up. The only significant issue I have observed is that Firefox is extremely slow, basically unusable, but good progress is being made on fixing that [1]. A Chromium port is available and is very usable even on Javascript heavy websites, I use the Ungoogled version of that for daily work and am happy with it (typing this comment using it, in point of fact) [2].
On balance it's a lot faster than the old AMD kit, and knowing I cannot be (easily) subverted at a firmware level is well worth the cost. Even using Tor makes sense on a platform like this, with full control of the system it's possible to control and manipulate the data spillage to various totalitarian regimes, and I've had fun with that in the past. Various packages install from the package manager like you would expect, no complaints on that end.
[1] https://www.talospace.com/2022/02/brief-status-update-on-power9.html
[2] https://twitter.com/RaptorCompSys/status/1487858941396766721?s=20