On Sun, 2022-09-11 at 08:19 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote: > Paul Wise <p...@debian.org> writes: > > Since the hardware most users use causes the first problem, the people > > fielding these support requests see that the free installer is in most > > cases not useful and therefore want to stop building or working on it. > > The problem is caused by hardware manufacturer chosing to require > non-free works for their use. The blame for that choice lies on the > hardware manufacturer, not on Debian. Accepting the blame for someone > else's choices and taking on the responsibility solve the consequences > of that choice seems misguided to me.
Hardware has always required non-free firmware (with very few exceptions); for various reasons less hardware preinstalls them. There is not much change in freeness here. > It makes it harder for users to > experience the frustration of such hardware themselves. Is making the experience of (trying to) use Debian on pretty much all modern hardware frustrating a design goal? I understand your comment as saying that making it harder to experience the frustration is a problem for you. > I disagree they > always get the non-free installer eventually: some end up learning about > the problem and chose better hardware. Sure, from experience many will just use a different distribution. Is this a problem for you or does it not matter? What is this "better hardware" by the way? Hardware that comes with pre-installed non-free firmware so one can pretend the firmware isn't really there? (And reading LWN comments: does this also include the "Windows" firmware and just running WSL? That might be in line with how GNU's operating system based on Hurd seems to be mostly used: in a VM.) I'm tempted to suggest the free installer should refuse to work with preinstalled non-free firmware by default so users are not confused into believing they run only free software. ;-) > If Debian takes on itself to solve the problems with non-free > hardware, I think we are in more difficult position to ask for a > change. So we should include firmware after all? Because Debian not including firmware seems to be trying to solve the problem on its own unlike the solution most others have adopted. Ansgar
