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Debian and firmware

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Re: Debian and firmware

#131

Post by einpoklum »

bruce511 wrote: post #31
josephcsible wrote: post #23

I'm usually on the FSF's side about everything, but this is one place where I disagree with them and agree with this article. A free OS with free firmware is definitely better than a free OS with proprietary firmware, but both of those are way better than a proprietary OS with proprietary firmware. By making the middle ground difficult, a lot of users have to choose between ideological purity and working hardware, an…

100% this. A decade ago I needed to replace some internal Linux file servers. I was keen to try ZFS, and so I tried BSD. Naturally on new hardware. Turns out BSD didn't support the on-board ether net. Tried a bunch of network cards from the cupboard, no support their either. Opportunity lost. Switched to Windows server (and was blown away by how polished that was, but that's another story.) I get the advantages of fr…

> who cares? Free Software does not need to grow, it fulfills a purpose for those who want to be ideological pure,

The point is to turn the tables in software. Free Software needs to grow and expand until it makes sense to say:

> who cares? Proprietary software does not need to grow, it fulfills a purpose for those who want to be ideological pure as propertarian/capitalist

and the question is whether to completely ignore anything involving non-free software or not.

Re: Debian and firmware

#132

Post by seba_dos1 »

regularfry wrote: post #87
franga2000 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A free OS with free firmware is definitely better than a free OS with proprietary firmware, but both of those are way better than a proprietary OS with proprietary firmware How about all three? We have plenty of very good "open with proprietary firmware" distros, many very similar to debian (Ubuntu, PopOS, Mint, Manjaro...), but not that many good "fully open" ones. That is the whole point of distros. If we dilute…

I think part of the problem is identifying which of those alternatives is closest to "exactly Debian, but without the hardware support problems". You really want something which tracks closely enough that bug reports against packages in that distro could be directly and intentionally accepted by Debian's tracker. The problem with accepting "Debian is not a friendly distro and that's fine" is that unlesss the snags ar…

> I think part of the problem is identifying which of those alternatives is closest to "exactly Debian, but without the hardware support problems".

That sounds like Debian's non-free ISO.

Re: Debian and firmware

#133

Post by eptcyka »

usrn wrote: post #124
eptcyka wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a solvable issue it deeply disturbs me you need to dance this dance. Whilst you might not be complaining about it, this is exactly the kind of stuff that deters people from using more FOSS. Not only are selecting non-default options every time you install a debian system, you've also spent the time to learn this ritual and you've had to comprehend the complexities of what, how and why to do this. Just to…

This kind of attitude is what makes FOSS good compared to (for example) ChromeOS though. It's hard to see when you've got one singular problem in front of you but once you abandon your principles and change all these things you're left with what is essentially Windows lite. It might be popular but it's hardly an improvement.

I don't think equating FOSS with tedious rituals does any good to any one. You can still have Debian installers be the way they are, with the addition of having a button that enabled non-free firmware to remove the need for USB tethering and three reboots. FOSS has a problem with UX design, and this is definitely one symptom.

Re: Debian and firmware

#134

Post by pwdisswordfish9 »

b5n wrote: post #14

As a long time Debian user I'm reluctant to criticize developer ergonomics as I'm not an _active_ contributor. That being said, _as a user_, I've not had any issue locating and using non-free firmware when required, and I would be disappointed to see the project change course by including non-free components in an offical manner. Removing the slight inconvenience (literally clicking a link _on the installation page_…

Debian is not the sort of project that would use ‘KPI’ unironically.

Re: Debian and firmware

#135

Post by stragies »

eptcyka wrote: post #114
stragies wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the very common issue with network card firmware (wired&wireless) I have taken to always providing initial network access during install through me hooking up my phone via USB-tethering. No Firmware needed. Then select "expert mode", enable "non-free" repo, maybe "backports", go through base install only, reboot, re-enable USB-tethering a last time on the phone, install needed network card firmware, reboot…

This is such a solvable issue it deeply disturbs me you need to dance this dance. Whilst you might not be complaining about it, this is exactly the kind of stuff that deters people from using more FOSS. Not only are selecting non-default options every time you install a debian system, you've also spent the time to learn this ritual and you've had to comprehend the complexities of what, how and why to do this. Just to…

The other reason I do it like this, is because many years ago I got a comment from an auditor about an item on the install-log: "Used CD-Image from https://cdimage...", because he spotted the "/unofficial/non-free/" part of the URL. The resulting discussion is what I wanted to avoid in future.

Re: Debian and firmware

#136

Post by usrn »

eptcyka wrote: post #133
usrn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of attitude is what makes FOSS good compared to (for example) ChromeOS though. It's hard to see when you've got one singular problem in front of you but once you abandon your principles and change all these things you're left with what is essentially Windows lite. It might be popular but it's hardly an improvement.

I don't think equating FOSS with tedious rituals does any good to any one. You can still have Debian installers be the way they are, with the addition of having a button that enabled non-free firmware to remove the need for USB tethering and three reboots. FOSS has a problem with UX design, and this is definitely one symptom.

>You can still have Debian installers be the way they are, with the addition of having a button that enabled non-free firmware

Like I said, each thing is just "fix this one thing by compromising principles." If you do that with all the UX problems you literally end up with ChromeOS. Different distros are on different places along the spectrum between Debian and ChromeOS. Ubuntu is further along for example, so you get applications in containers and other things like that.

Re: Debian and firmware

#137

Post by derefr »

fxtentacle wrote: post #76
b5n wrote: post #14

As a long time Debian user I'm reluctant to criticize developer ergonomics as I'm not an _active_ contributor. That being said, _as a user_, I've not had any issue locating and using non-free firmware when required, and I would be disappointed to see the project change course by including non-free components in an offical manner. Removing the slight inconvenience (literally clicking a link _on the installation page_…

I believe there should be an official non-free repository (akin to Ubuntu's) which users can enable offline, meaning it needs to be stored on the official CD. Enabling it should display a big scary warning about handing over partial control of your machine to greedy faceless megacorps who will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat if that makes them money. Maybe add an illustration of a robot terminator, to really d…

> meaning it needs to be stored on the official CD

Wouldn't this imply per-seat IP licenses for things like embedded H.264 software fallback decoding in GPU drivers? I.e. the reason that Ubuntu (that doesn't really care about "proprietary" software by itself) still doesn't ship media codecs on the CD, nor driver blobs that could include them?

Re: Debian and firmware

#138

Post by derefr »

bayindirh wrote: post #120
fxtentacle wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe there should be an official non-free repository (akin to Ubuntu's) which users can enable offline, meaning it needs to be stored on the official CD. Enabling it should display a big scary warning about handing over partial control of your machine to greedy faceless megacorps who will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat if that makes them money. Maybe add an illustration of a robot terminator, to really d…

> I believe there should be an official non-free repository (akin to Ubuntu's) which users can enable offline, meaning it needs to be stored on the official CD. There's already a "non-free" section under official "dists" ([0] for stable). It's just not added to the ISOs. Netinstall directly asks that whether you want non-free enabled during installation too. The only thing is whether building CDs with it or not. Actu…

A better tool would slipstream the data into the ISO image, I would think, since you might want/need the drivers available at install time in order to even boot certain non-free hardware, and you might only be getting the thing to boot in the first place using e.g. a PXE server.

Re: Debian and firmware

#139

Post by jabl »

scbrg wrote: post #112
jabl wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could just as well claim that if Debian decides to include non-free firmware on the official install images, those that are deeply offended about that can sod off and create some derivative distro with the dirty bits removed. It's not written in stone that Debian has to be the purest distro of them all.

> It's not written in stone that Debian has to be the purest distro of them all. Perhaps not purest , and perhaps not in stone, but in the closest thing to a digital equivalent it's at least written that Debian has to be pure . The very first bullet of Debian's Social contract is: "Debian will remain 100% free". You could argue that when that changes, it stops being Debian. https://www.debian.org/social_contract

Well, Debian the OS, yes. But where do you draw the line? Debian still allows your web browser to execute non-free Javascript that you download from some shady site on the internet. ;)

Anyway, for FW one can certainly argue it's not part of the OS, as it's executing in some auxiliary core on the device rather than being part of the OS itself executing on the main CPU's. And further, if that same non-free FW would be stored in ROM or on flash, Debian has no problems with it as long as open source drivers are present in the kernel. So the only problem here is devices that want the driver to provide the FW blob to them upon initialization instead of the FW blob being persistently stored on the device. Not really any meaningful difference from a software freedom perspective either way.

Re: Debian and firmware

#140

Post by tremon »

anthk wrote: post #111
tremon wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't what the radeon driver does for AMD gpu's, and hasn't for years: loading the driver automatically enables the full rendering engine and disables the VESA modes, even if no firmware has been loaded. Which means that on a normal system with radeon.ko present but not the firmware files, you get a few seconds of kernel output followed by a black screen. For the systems where I don't want the firmware (servers)…

The Radeon module works on non-accelerated mode with the modesetting driver instead of the xorg Radeon one. At /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-radeon.conf: Section "Device" identifier "Radeon" Driver "modesetting" EndSection Bugs may arise, maybe it could be a good idea to disable the Composite extension too.

I guess I confused the issue by referring it as the "radeon driver", but I meant to implicate the radeon.ko kernel module, not the radeon(4) Xorg driver. The servers I'm talking about don't even have X installed (they're Ceph OSD nodes).
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