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Reconsidering Debian's Inclusion of Non-Free Firmware – A Call for Discussion

by ajdude on 3/11/25, 11:12 AM with 2 comments

  • by veidr on 3/11/25, 1:23 PM

    Interesting. I literally switched to Debian (finally!) because of this change (which debuted in the most recent major release, Debian 12 "bookworm").

    I'd always wanted to (because Ubuttnu sucks, Fedora seemed like it would get all-wet from Red Hat pissing on their derivatives (which finally did happen just as the prophesies foretold), so I was using Arch which is, I mean fine — or at least okay — but just not the O.G. daddy linux that I wanted).

    Not that it is insane to deal with getting the non-free firmware yourself on like, one real hardware machine, or a couple machines, but I took this change to mean Debian was sort of growing up from the Richard Stallman-level purity in favor of moving the lever one notch over toward the side of pragmatism.

    As an aside, there's a full-thread index that reveals the scope of the discussion, which may not be obvious if you just click the link at the top of this thread: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/03/threads.html#0...

  • by realxrobau on 3/11/25, 1:26 PM

    I think the consensus appears to be summed up here, with the response from wraw at debian:

    https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/03/msg00185.html