I've gone down the road of setting up a "blob-free" system, just to see what it might take, and it turned out (unsurprisingly) that it requires an enormous amount of sacrifice and effort. In the end I had a fragile old thinkpad x60 that ran an OS that got in my way. I lacked the time/effort/enthusiasm/means to commit to the cause, and now it's sitting in the corner collecting dust.