It has never made any sense to make a normal user(newbie) to have to search for drivers for wireless or video. The vote has probably made quite a few FSF/GNU zealots upset. I see it as a good thing. Drivers in the installer will make Linux adoption easier.
This is not how on boarding of new users works. If you put up a RTFM wall and intentionally make their installation fail they either just stick with Windows or use another more newbie friendly distro.
And Debian is a community driven distribution. It needs new users (who to a small percentage become contributors) all the time or it can’t survive.
Edit: also I don’t see how this is disrespecting your digital rights. If you feel so strongly about the issue you surely made your homework and only run hardware with libre firmware, so this has absolutely no effect on you.
No my last point was different. At no point is Debian forcing you to use these non-Free firmwares. They are a purely optional inclusion in their installer for those people that do need to use them to get a functional system. Thus your digital rights are not negatively impacted at all.
Granted there are some rare edge cases where both options exist, but after installing Debian you are free to revert any such non-Free firmware on your actual system.
I think you somehow maneuvered yourself into a illogical position without realizing it?
Including some optional firmwares in the install boot-medium infringes zero rights of yours and none of the 4 software freedoms are impacted by this.
Complain with the hardware vendors for making these firmwares a requirement if you will, but better not buy such hardware in the first place. But Debian absolutely did the right thing here to their current and future users by optionally including these non-free firmwares regardless of what some ideological demagogues say.
Not really. They are either not very beginner friendly or have other issues that make then objectively worse, like Ubuntu pushing their Snap crap etc.
Debian made some nice efforts to improve userfriendlyness in recent years, but their installer just failing to work on common hardware was a major sticking point. This should largely resolve this issue at no detriment to anyone.
I believe there’s a lot of misunderstanding of what’s freeSW, what’s openSW, and what debian repos have been providing all along.
Debian has been providing a “non-free” repo for all versions they keep in their repo servers (experimental, unstable, testing, stable) since I can remember.
And to me it’s important to make a difference of what’s freeSW vs. what’s not freeSW, and I prefer to use freeSW, unless I’m forced to use something it’s not freeSW and there’s no way to overcome that.
This is one of the things openSW movements (remember, IBM, MS, Google, and several other corps all are part of, or contribute to openSW fundations, but never had supported the idea of freeSW) have influenced to, and convinced most into. Now the value of freeSW means almost nothing, and most are just happy with openSW. I can’t judge anyone, but just say, this is really sad. And once again I see people treating those defending principles as 2nd class citizens, :(
It has never made any sense to make a normal user(newbie) to have to search for drivers for wireless or video. The vote has probably made quite a few FSF/GNU zealots upset. I see it as a good thing. Drivers in the installer will make Linux adoption easier.
deleted by creator
This is not how on boarding of new users works. If you put up a RTFM wall and intentionally make their installation fail they either just stick with Windows or use another more newbie friendly distro.
And Debian is a community driven distribution. It needs new users (who to a small percentage become contributors) all the time or it can’t survive.
Edit: also I don’t see how this is disrespecting your digital rights. If you feel so strongly about the issue you surely made your homework and only run hardware with libre firmware, so this has absolutely no effect on you.
deleted by creator
No my last point was different. At no point is Debian forcing you to use these non-Free firmwares. They are a purely optional inclusion in their installer for those people that do need to use them to get a functional system. Thus your digital rights are not negatively impacted at all.
deleted by creator
Granted there are some rare edge cases where both options exist, but after installing Debian you are free to revert any such non-Free firmware on your actual system.
deleted by creator
I think you somehow maneuvered yourself into a illogical position without realizing it?
Including some optional firmwares in the install boot-medium infringes zero rights of yours and none of the 4 software freedoms are impacted by this.
Complain with the hardware vendors for making these firmwares a requirement if you will, but better not buy such hardware in the first place. But Debian absolutely did the right thing here to their current and future users by optionally including these non-free firmwares regardless of what some ideological demagogues say.
It certainly made proprietary software stakeholders/companies very happy indeed.
No. That would be debian-only. Adoption-front is generally Ubuntu, Mint, …
Yeah, all it did was make newbies choose Ubuntu over Debian and that is just objectively the worse choice.
I understand the point, but I was thinking that there were already Linux distributions fitting into that niche…
Not really. They are either not very beginner friendly or have other issues that make then objectively worse, like Ubuntu pushing their Snap crap etc.
Debian made some nice efforts to improve userfriendlyness in recent years, but their installer just failing to work on common hardware was a major sticking point. This should largely resolve this issue at no detriment to anyone.
I believe there’s a lot of misunderstanding of what’s freeSW, what’s openSW, and what debian repos have been providing all along.
Debian has been providing a “non-free” repo for all versions they keep in their repo servers (experimental, unstable, testing, stable) since I can remember.
And to me it’s important to make a difference of what’s freeSW vs. what’s not freeSW, and I prefer to use freeSW, unless I’m forced to use something it’s not freeSW and there’s no way to overcome that.
This is one of the things openSW movements (remember, IBM, MS, Google, and several other corps all are part of, or contribute to openSW fundations, but never had supported the idea of freeSW) have influenced to, and convinced most into. Now the value of freeSW means almost nothing, and most are just happy with openSW. I can’t judge anyone, but just say, this is really sad. And once again I see people treating those defending principles as 2nd class citizens, :(