Debian and firmware

> Modern laptops normally don't come with wired ethernet now.

Both then and now, on my laptop, I use Ethernet occasionally but rarely, only when I specifically need its speed or reliability advantages. The rest of the time I use Wi-Fi, which did and does require non-free firmware. Ethernet moved from a built-in port to a dongle, but my actual usage patterns have barely changed.

That said, there used to be some Wi-Fi chips that didn't require non-free firmware (just not the ones I had), whereas now there are none.

For desktops, on the other hand, it was and is worth hooking up Ethernet, making the point largely moot. (I think I used Wi-Fi on my desktop at the time, but I wished I didn't have to. Now I don't.)

> There won't be any usable graphics on the laptop's screen.

Even at the time, I saw hardware-accelerated graphics as essential, both for windowing (Compiz) and for gaming. So I used the 'nvidia' non-free driver on the PC… just as I do now. (I don't remember what the Mac had.)

Incidentally, for those who don't prioritize graphics performance over freedom, free drivers are better than they used to be. Unfortunately, they require non-free firmware – and I know this post is about firmware. But still… that seems like a win of some sort.

It is the OpenGL and Vulkan libraries. Code calls the Vulkan API, and mesa translates that into something the video driver can handle, which in turn passes the command to the video card.

> Why do people tell me not to install the video drivers from the Radeon website.

Because AMD have spent a lot of time and effort getting the drivers in the kernel, and the website drivers are old and no longer the best. There is "AMDGPU Pro" video drivers, which gives you the AMD OpenGL/Vulkan libraries, but they are generally not as good as Mesa as Mesa has everyone working on it.

> How to I update them?

AMD have spent a lot of time getting them in the kernel. You update by getting the latest version of Debian, or switching to a distribution that uses a newer kernel.

> What is going on and why isn't it as simple as Window's where I run an executable and a setup wizard does the rest?

It is a lot more simple. It is all built in. This is the beauty of collaborative development, AMD and Intel get improvements based upon each others work and they concentrate on giving us better hardware. This is also the reason that AMD works so much better on Linux than Windows, and generally AMD gives Nvidia a run for its money on Linux, at least according to the last benchmarks I saw.

Sure, there's no VC breathing down the neck of Debian, but arguably the purpose of free software is to provide software freedom for users. If people aren't able to use that free software, it's a bit pointless. Further, a (small) fraction of users grow into developers creating more free software.

To the extent non-free firmware allows more people to use free software, I don't think it's clear at all that a puritan approach to firmware is a net win for software freedom.

For the longest time (since fixed), trying to use Wi-Fi in debian-installer simply didn't work, regardless whether I used the unofficial image or dumped the firmware debs on disk. Can't complain about that anymore since it's fixed.

Now that Wi-Fi works when available at install-time, let's try to install a bog standard desktop system. Did you run the text installer or the graphical installer? If you used the text installer, you might be surprised to get an unescapable gray screen on an otherwise fully working booted system! Your video out doesn't work properly because kernel modesetting doesn't work without firmware or some mumbo jumbo like that. Your options are:

- Run the graphical installer in the first place so that the GPU firmware is used/installed by the installer

- Run a shell in the text installer and do "apt-install firmware-blah", a command which is only documented in a dusty unstyled html in a file cabinet hidden by a beware of leopard sign copyrighted 2010

- On boot up, use some relatively arcane GRUB magic (I'm just a user, so I have to look it up every time, okay?) to boot into some kind of safe non-graphical mode and install the GPU firmware

(Bonus: the unofficial firmware-included disc image symlinks the firmware debs, so the image only works when you DD it. The most popular Windows disc writing software Rufus recommends writing disc images in ISO mode (file-by-file) so that you can use excess free space. If you're wondering why the firmware directory has a bunch of 0 byte files, that's why, and you need to switch to DD mode.)