Mixed and competing thoughts and emotions. On the one hand, I love that Debian was the community GNU/Linux that shipped with the ability to be 100% unencumbered super easily. On the other hand, I feel like a system should be usable immediately with little effort if it is to be enjoyed and properly useful. Then there’s part of me screaming “tradition not trend” and another part of me is screaming back with “finally!” It would be nice if they made it optional within the installer I suppose. Maybe I’m just a crazy person.
Unfortunately "non-free firmware" doesn't really capture the entire issue, akin to how the FSF misses the mark with their baked-into-flash exception. Proprietary binary blob on a device effectively separated by an IOMMU? That's a peripheral, most of them run non-free firmware. Proprietary binary blob on a device that has DMA access? That's a tainted main computer with a security issue.<p>I hope the installer settles out into making these distinctions and informing users of the compromises being made. When I stick a Debian installer into a machine that requires non-free firmware to work, my intent is pretty clear. But that doesn't apply to someone just starting out.
Finally. The user experience of manually providing non-free firmware on a separate USB stick was horrible, even for a technical user.<p>What Debian really expects are DEB <i>packages</i> placed on the drive, not raw firmware files. Finding which package you need (the installer only tells you the raw firmware files, not the package containing them) and obtaining them is not straightforward - there is a web UI to browse packages and download files but navigating those requires existing domain knowledge of Debian and Linux in general. It is not a straightforward web form "want a package? enter package name and architecture and we'll give you the download link".<p>I now know from memory which firmware packages my systems need and the requirements for the USB stick and how to navigate the web UIs to download packages, but the first time probably wasted an hour of my time searching around before piecing all the various (and sometimes contradictory) resources out there into a coherent solution that worked.
Like most folks here, I have mixed feelings about this. The dichotomy of "it's about time" versus "how tragic that it came to this" seems to be common, and I can get on board with that.<p>Having said that, I don't think that having firmware blobs in the installer should be Debian's hill to die on, and I'm glad they decided to acquiesce to practical necessity. Between wireless NICs and graphics devices, it's just too blasted difficult these days to install a FOSS operating system without binary blobs - good, bad, or ugly, it is what it is, and I respect their ability to recognize when something simply cannot be changed [at this time].<p>Keep picking your battles, Debian crew - keep fighting the good fight.
This is almost lolsville. First they wall off the GNU Emacs documention for not conforming with the DFSG, but then they make the <i>installer</i> non-free? Sigh.
So this is only for the installer, right? The software that is not needed for basic functionality will not be installed permanently, right?<p>Also, if there are two driver implementations, as is often the case for GPUs, which will be preferred?
Shouldn’t firmware in general be considered part of the “hardware tier”? Free software, including Debian, had no choice but to run on non-free hardware since inception anyway, right?
Open source Developers should be support more open hardware not worried about supporting the latest closed dodgy firmware<p>Isn't this what made Debian popular? Maybe this is good news for new distributions like Nix and Guix<p>And a firmware free wifi usb costs 10$ on ebay or ali express<p>Or maybe this is just a clarification for Debian identity , why support non-free except on the installation? <i>Let's just hope in their SC it is clarified to always ask the user, and only enabled it by manually</i>
One of the things about debian that made it unique was the debian social contract, and the dedication to free software. The way this is celebrated in some quarters is troubling.<p>Getting the non-free firmware iso in case your hardware needed it was never difficult.