Heck, you don't even have to go that far, I'm running Ubuntu on this laptop right now. It has no ethernet port and only Ubuntu could configure the Wi-Fi (without hand-holding): something to do with proprietary drivers for the chipset or something like that.
> My point is that it's basically impossible to avoid proprietary software these days.
Yeah, but that's the problem, that's the very circumstance with which we should not compromise (in my opinion. And yeah, I'm compromising right now, but I don't like it. It's a long story, but in a nutshell I'm moving and stuck using a cheap laptop at the moment. One day soon...)
I'm almost at the point where I'm going to make my own chips! Quoting myself from the other day on the Zenbleed thread: "Every time I think it's insane to contemplate making one's own chips something like this comes up, and I realize it's insane to let so much of our lives depend on these insanely complicated devices. It feels like walking on a tightrope above an unbounded fractal chasm."
I was really just betting on you using at least one of the following - proprietary BIOS, non-free network switch/router, wifi, a run of the mill keyboard or mouse, a switching power supply, any modern appliance, or a webpage that runs javascript from a remote server you don't control. My point is that it's basically impossible to avoid proprietary software these days. So we're much better off analyzing the use of proprietary software in terms of how it can specifically work against you within how it's been deployed, rather than as some binary pure/impure thing.
Like my main desktop is a KGPE-D16 running almost blobless coreboot (⌐■-■), apart from the CPU microcode, which I don't have much choice on besides to trust AMD at some point in time. Yet there are numerous domains of proprietary software that support it, without which it could not run. However those domains don't impinge upon my freedom within the CPU domain, as they are appropriately isolated. For example if I focus on my keyboard, its software's lack of freedom seriously destroys my ability to modify it. That is terrible, within the narrow context of modifying my keyboard. However it's not relevant to the larger scope, as the keyboard isn't really able to affect the freedom of the CPU domain.