On Mon, Jan 18, 2021 at 6:27 PM Marc Haber wrote: > Imagine the catastrophal message we're sending by "here is our > official image, but that one is unlikely to work on your laptop, > better use this here."
As this thread shows the current situation wrt hardware and software freedom is pretty catastrophic, I think we owe it to our users to not keep them in the dark about these issues. Probably a better way to do this is a set of "Debian Installer Launcher" apps in the various app stores that can detect your hardware, check if it needs the non-free ISO, copy any needed non-redistributable non-free drivers[1]/firmware from the original OS, warn about all the non-freeness found and the consequences of that while not offering any solution to that*, but offering to use only free software if the non-free parts are for hardware the user does not plan to use, detect what software you have already installed and the free alternatives in Debian and then download/verify/launch the appropriate Debian installer CD image with the appropriate preseeding, possibly via virtual machine interfaces so that you can do the install whilst continuing to browse the web and research better hardware options and the reasons for preferring free software. * because lets face it, there is no-one attempting to reverse engineer and replace non-free WiFi firmware any more, although there used[2] to be at least Prism54 and OpenFWWF working on that, neither of which are in Debian though and probably they and carl9170fw/ath9k_htc.fw aren't useful to have in Debian either since they are for very old WiFi chips and standards. AFAIK the only firmware reverse engineering going on is nouveau with nvidia GPUs and I believe they are now blocked by nvidia signing their blobs. Even Intel's Open Sound Firmware project doesn't allow software freedom on most devices as OEMs require Intel signatures. 1. ala ndiswrapper 2. https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
