"Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com> writes: > On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 10:53:46AM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote: >> "Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com> writes: >> >> > In practice, the free installer is useless on its own. >> >> That is not my experience -- I'm using Debian through its installer on a >> number of laptops, desktops and servers, and for my purposes it works >> fine and in general I have not needed to enable non-free/contrib for >> hardware support. You may have other purposes for which it does not >> work, but that doesn't make it useless for everyone, and there are >> alternatives available to solve your use-case (unofficial non-free >> installer) that doesn't entail the cost of abandoning the free software >> ideals of the Debian project. >> >> /Simon > > Hi Simon, > > I don't think you quite picked up on my meaning. The free installer is > absolutely useless _because_ you are already using a machine containing a bunch > of firmware (that you may or may not know anything about) - disk drives, basic > drivers for graphics cards. If the free installer works, it's because you > already have firmware. Hi Andrew. Ah, thanks for explaining what you meant. I have no problem with builtin non-upgradeable firmware -- see https://ryf.fsf.org/about/criteria for rationale. So I still disagree with you, but now for a different reason. > Now we're in a situation where non-free firmware is absolutely required for > basic functionality - without the Intel non-free firmware, you can't run > sound for a visually impaired user to install if you have some Intel laptops. > That VI user will *never* be able to install Debian. That is not true. They can chose not to buy a machine with that unwanted property. There is a gazillion devices that won't be able to run Debian for many different reasons, I don't see how this is an argument to necessarily include proprietary software in Debian. /Simon
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