Hello all, Let me chime in, as one of the persons who decided that Debian (currently) only supply live images with non-free-firmware enabled.
First: this discussion (as I understand it) purely about the installation procedure, whether the non-free-firmware bits are made available on the installation media. After the installation is done, it will be up to the user to include non-free-firmware or not. Note that Debian Libre uses the 'live-installer' module, which does not offer the question about non-free-firmware as the netinst ISO images do, so there isn't a possibility to turn access to non-free-firmware on or off. When generating the Debian live images, one of my design goals would be to allow for a offline installation on modern hardware. As many others already have pointed out, using modern hardware (currently) nearly always requires non-free-firmware to run properly. See e.g. speech installation with an Intel i915 chipset on a (specifically: mine) Lenovo laptop [1] which I fixed in March 2025. When the 'Debian Libre' project was announced, I asked on the debian-live mailing list [2]: 'You want to officially publish the generated images (as I see on debian-devel), are you ready to the the quality assurance of them?' In the past live images were published without automated tests and still require lots of manual tests, of which some are questioned whether that would be necessary [3]. Debian provides so many packages and there are only a few full integration tests running automatically, it is very easy to break something. Looking at https://libre.debian.net/, I see that 5 images times 2 architectures are published. For the official Debian live images, Debian uses openQA [4] for automated tests, and there currently isn't much room for many more images. The arm64 images are currently not generated and tested because of missing/insufficient resources. Simon has offered to supply additional hardware, I haven't found time to properly respond yet. On 21/02/2026 18:57, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
So, go ahead! Scratch your itch!
Technically, the Debian Libre images are created very similarly [5] to the official Debian live images [6], with IMHO just minor differences (the main one about the inclusion of the non-free-firmware section). I would not oppose to generate and test a live image that would not contain non-free-firmware, but I would rather suggest to offer (initially?) one choice. That image would be 'regular' Debian, no need to brand it as 'Debian Libre'. But which one to choose and how to offer/name/label it? However, I also have a blog post by Thomas Lange [7] in mind, Debian already offers so many choices... I'm unsure what should be done. With kind regards, Roland Clobus (Co-)maintainer of the Debian live images (Co-)maintainer of the Debian openQA instance [1] https://salsa.debian.org/live-team/live-build/-/commit/817c58280a20c466cbdd7d3bc61e2339b21610e4 [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-live/2025/11/msg00034.html [3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2026/01/msg00008.html [4] https://openqa.debian.net/ [5] https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/debian-libre/debian-libre-live/-/blob/main/run.sh?ref_type=heads#L110 [6] https://salsa.debian.org/live-team/live-build/-/blob/master/test/rebuild.sh?ref_type=heads#L492 [7] https://blog.fai-project.org/posts/cdimages-maze/
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