Re: Changing how we handle non-free firmware
Ansgar dijo [Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 06:24:40PM +0200]:
> I don't think everyone can affort the energy (in)efficiency of a decade
> old hardware. Most users will also have more recent hardware; I don't
> know much 10+ years hardware still in productive use...
>
> Either way, such ancient hardware is probably not a good example for
> the firmware problem: it was a significantly smaller problem back then.
Back in the day (~20-25 years ago), I was considering to switch from
Linux to OpenBSD. I prefered their stands on many aspects, starting
with security. Back then, you were warned quite out-front by their
developers: You don't shop for an operating system that suits well
your hardware: You get the right hardware to run the operating system
you have chosen.
You know, like the serial port #1 should be at memory location 0x03e8
using IRQ 4; if you had it configured at 0x02f8 and IRQ 3, it would be
reported as serial port #2 even if #1 does not exist... and that sort.
But while we sysadmins, developers and in general techy users can find
some beauty in building just the perfect machine with precisely the
hardware we want... End users will often not want to unscrew their
laptop to gaze at its inner beauties. And will not even *want* to know
the driver their wireless NIC uses. Debian should try to cater (more)
for those users, becauser if we reject newbies, they will take the
curiosity somewhere else -- and quite probably, when they advance and
become sysadmins, developers or techy enough... they will only have a
bad memory about us.
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