employees to install an OS of their choosing on company hardware (and
retain administrator access).
Does your employer have IT support? Have you requested assistance?
I am at a university, so yes, there is some freedom in this regard, as long as IT security is as good or better than with the usual OS, which of course it is, being that it is Debian. But the IT support are not equipped to help me with anything GNU/Linux. They have someone who administers GNU/Linux servers, but that person doesn't deal with user-level support.
Have you requested assistance from ThinkPenguin?
The IT person installed the wifi card for me and he communicated with them at the time, but I haven't needed to talk to them after that since that has not been (and isn't) an issue.
As other readers have pointed, out, Debian 11 may very well be slower
than Debian 10 on the same hardware; even after firmware issues are
resolved.
As for the firmware -- what about running an older Debian (or Windows 10
Pro) on the hardware, installing a hypervisor, and running Debian 11 in
a VM? For a year or more, my Debian daily driver was a VirtualBox
virtual machine on a mid-2015 MacBook Pro 15 Retina. Debian thought it
was running on a stock x86 personal computer with full hardware support
OOTB. Performance was surprisingly good, graphics were beautiful,
networking and was easily controlled from the Virtual Box manager. Only
down-side was keyboard integration -- I seem to recall conflicts with
certain key combinations.
I don't use Virtual Box sinceit is proprietary, so I do the virtual machines in Gnome-boxes.
I have never heard of a hypervisor, I'll look into this possibility and maybe try it on an older Debian stable