On 10/5/21 06:21, L Dimov wrote:
On Tuesday, October 5, 2021, 1:59:21 AM EDT, David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> wrote:
If your laptop has hardware that requires proprietary firmware, I very
much doubt that the firmware in question will ever be open-sourced.
Without the proprietary firmware, the best case is reduced
functionality using reverse-engineered drivers -- e.g. NVIDIA and
Nouveau. Wi-Fi adapters requiring proprietary firmware tend to be
non-functional without such.
Either keep your laptop and install the proprietary firmware, or sell it
and get something with hardware that does not require proprietary firmware.
It is a work laptop, so I am definitely not selling it:) Plus, it is only 2-3 years old.
What bugs me is that it worked fine with Debian 10. I even had bought a wifi card from thinkpenguin since the original wouldn't work with free software.
I am curious about your arrangement with your employer -- few allow 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? Have you requested assistance from ThinkPenguin?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.
David