I got screwed one time really hard with emerge. I didn’t update for a long time and it was messed up enough that I couldn’t install anything due to python issues and I also couldn’t update due to python issues and there were circular dependencies. Experienced people on the Gentoo discord tried and failed to help me get that fixed without an os reinstall but all efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.
This was on a slow as molasses Athlon XP so reinstalling Gentoo was completely out of the question. Since Gentoo was basically the only thing that would run on that cpu, I got a different motherboard from ebay instead.
Some arm sbc computers have schematics available. Could someone with equipment for bga components and a means of making pcbs theoretically make a backdoorless one and use it to do all the illegal stuff they want?
There are open source x86s now but homebrewers are just now getting around to making barely working, not even good 386 and 486 stuff so it’ll be a long ass time before open source x86 stuff becomes more viable.