• poVoq
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      fedilink
      02 years ago

      The majority of the hardware either requires it, or it doesn’t. It is the rare edge case that it can also work in a degraded mode using only Free software, and you are free to not use such firmwares on your system after installing Debian on it. But yes in the 30 minutes or so that you use the installer it will be auto-loaded helping a lot of users actually install an running system and inflicting no damage to you at all.

        • poVoq
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          fedilink
          1
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          I disagree that it removes any Freedom from you, but even if that were the case the damage would be so minuscule compared to the massive improvement for others that literally could not even install Debian on their system before.

          And sure, there might be possible complicated work-arounds, but this issue has existed for years and no one bothered to implement them. So finally the silent majority took the right step to make this minimal impact change, and now the ball is really back with those complaining about this change. I am sure Debian will not be opposed to include some sort of selection in the boot process if someone would actually implement it, but that is far from trivial to do.