On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 05:18:49PM -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote:
To a certain degree, promoting official installer images without non-free firmware next to installer images with non-free firmware can raise awareness of the problem. To another degree, it probably wouldn’t do anything right now except confuse some subset of users and require extra effort from those generating the images. Debian is simply too small of an organization to make a very big splash by such a move.
You don't really need to generate those images, as they are equally unusable to most users whether they exist or not. Unless I guess you want people to try them to learn a lesson that their hardware is not working without non-free firmware?
As has already been mentioned, nothing of substance has changed since Debian held a GR on this issue. However, if down the road open hardware with free firmware became more widely available (I’m looking at you, RISC-V, although I understand that the most likely short-term outcome is that companies will produce non-free firmware for their RISC-V processors), then it might be worth reopening the issue for consideration.
That's just processors though, and processors usually contain their non-free firmware anyway. The original issue was about hardware that doesn't contain firmware but wants it loaded from the OS.
-- WBR, wRAR
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