I'm a 10+ year Debian user and Free Software supporter. Two weeks ago I was surprised to discover 29 non-free components on the Debian 12/Bookworm desktop that I've been using for two months. There hadn't been any opt-in nor opt-out. It took me a dozen Bookworm re-installations over the next week to figure out what was going on.
The following is what I found, which I believe are important Installer bugs that need fixing: 1) Bug #1 / Debian installer / all live image DVDs: When using the Debian Installer on live images, it installs 29 non-free components without opt-in/out or warning. My guess is that these installers didn't change between Bullseye and Bookworm, but now that there's non-free-firmware in Debian, these installers need fixing. I understand that live images may be "intended" for new users trying Debian, but it would be unreasonable to expect such users to not use those Installers if they like what they've tried. However, when they do install there, they're now not getting what the Debian homepage's "Why Debian", "Our Philosophy", and "Who We Are" pages imply they're getting. Recommendation: there needs to be an additional step to opt-in or opt-out of non-free-firmware so as to not mislead users. 2) Bug #2 / Debian installer / all live image DVDs: Using "firmware=never" (the instruction now being provided by Debian.org to avoid non-free-firmware) does not work with Debian's live images installer. After using those instructions, I still detected 29 non-free components on my computer immediately following installation. And there was no warning or error message to tell me that this recommended method hadn't worked. Recommendation: While I think the suggestion for #1 above would be an acceptable solution to this issue as well, there should at least be an error message or warning to inform users that the "firmware=never" instructions don't work when installing via live image DVDs. Debian 12.5
