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Debian and firmware

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Re: Debian and firmware

#81

Post by apatheticonion »

happymellon wrote: post #54
apatheticonion wrote: post #29

As a Windows/MacOS user who has moved full time to linux, I ended up on Debian Testing as my daily (going to try Fedora soon). I still live back in the days when Fedora would give you a pop up to install non-free drivers ("additional software" or something like that). I have been using Debian as my daily driver for almost 6 months now and Linux in general for years - I still have no idea how the video drivers work. I…

> What is mesa? 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 be…

This is great context, this only threw me because when I installed Debian and some other distros, I didn't have any graphics card drivers and was confused why and how to get them.

> Because AMD have spent a lot of time and effort getting the drivers in the kernel

Does that mean the drivers are open source?

> It is a lot more simple. It is all built in.

When it works. When you have no context (like me) and you are presented with the wrong resolution and no GPU acceleration - It's really hard to find a tl;dr of how to get your graphics card working.

Your comment was literally more valuable than a few hours on the internet trying to disambiguate the situation.

Re: Debian and firmware

#82

Post by franga2000 »

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…

> 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 Debian's fully open philosophy, we don't really gain anything in middle category, but lose one of the few remaining good fully open distros.

To fix your example: "Oh, you say this Debian thing doesn't support my network card? I see why everyone recommended that Pop thing instead, I'll use that then."

Debian is not a friendly distro for users who don't know what they're getting themselves into and that's fine. That's why nobody should (and nobody does) recommend it to Windows users looking for their first Linux distro.

Re: Debian and firmware

#83

Post by throwaway48375 »

Gigachad wrote: post #26
throwaway48375 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are the only reason I use Debian at all.

This could be seen as a benefit and a downside. It’s basically suggesting that you find other distros nicer to use but chose to use the less nice one due to principals. Most users will pick the nicer to use one.

I don't want non-free software. I don't find other distros nicer to use. I chose a distribution whose values aligned with mine. I have switched before and will, admittedly reluctantly, change again to find one whose principals align with mine. I find Debian, as it exists now, the correct balance of ease of use while still respecting my ideals.

Re: Debian and firmware

#84

Post by bruce511 »

jyrkesh wrote: post #80
bruce511 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Switched to Windows server (and was blown away by how polished that was, but that's another story.) Have you told this story anywhere else already? I'd love to read it. In a past life I worked very close to Windows Server, but I mostly selfhost Linux at home now. What is it mostly identity related? I miss AD sometimes...or maybe storage? The SMB stack is pretty good too.

I haven't. I had set up the machine with 2 large spindle drives, 2 large SSDs, and a separate SSD for the OS.

after booting windows looked at the disk layout and asked me what I planned to do. It suggested some quick options, one of which was exactly what I planned to do (raid the spindle pair, and raid the SSD pair) and one even better (create a volume putting the SSD and spindle together, and then raid that.)

Yes thanks I said, and it did everything. By contrast setting up raid on the previous Linux box, albeit 5 years earlier) took days of searching for docs, specific magic incantations on the command line, and lots of rebooting.

So yes, I get the freedom thing, but sometimes a computer is just a tool, and I want it to just work.

Re: Debian and firmware

#86

Post by bruce511 »

jabl wrote: post #56
bruce511 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> On the other hand who cares? Free Software does not need to grow 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 us…

The purpose is to provide free software _for those who want it_.

If the goal is to create converts then a puritanical approach is a poor approach, IMO.

Personally I've never seen the FSF approach as being "conversional" - rather it acts as a purity touchstone.

Debian needs to articulate its specific goals to the author, there are many paths they can take, but unless the goals are clearly articulated its hard to see what the right path is.

Note that some goals which we take for granted (everything should be free, get folk to switch) are not necessarily compatible. I think that is the root of this discussion.

Re: Debian and firmware

#87

Post by regularfry »

franga2000 wrote: post #82
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…

> 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 are addressed, the number of reasons for people to run off to Pop and Ubuntu will only increase over time. Having a friendlier on-ramp to something that is actually Debian is good, but I suspect you could satisfy the "keep Debian pure" requirement with a fairly thin branding layer.

Re: Debian and firmware

#88

Post by ACS_Solver »

Gigachad wrote: post #43
zrm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian is one of the top Linux distributions, so there are empirically a large number of people not being deterred. And many of the other top Linux distributions are Debian derivatives which both participate in the community and provide the alternate experience. Upholding its principles is the way Debian distinguishes itself. If you don't like it, use Mint or something.

Debian is a great project I know. But the comment that they only use debian for its principals directly suggests they would use something else if principals were not considered. Suggesting the other distros are better for their uses. Anecdotally I don't think I have ever seen a debian desktop user, and I wouldn't pick it for desktop either because they don't make it easy to get everything working like other distros d…

I'm a Debian desktop user not because of principles - I use proprietary blobs including Nvidia's drivers - but just because it's what works best of the distros I know.

I've been burned a couple times too many on Ubuntu's regressions. They'll ship a newer version of a package that breaks some use case which isn't super common but not super obscure either, and then I have to figure out what broke. I've stopped trusting Ubuntu's packages so I don't use Mint either even though I like the distro.

Debian continues to impress me with its stability. I run the testing branch at home and breakage is still extremely rare. Yes, there's things that Debian makes harder to set up, and running Debian means you basically resign yourself to running a userspace that's 1+ year old, but the overall experience just works better in my experience.

Maybe I should give Fedora a serious try one day. I haven't properly used any Red Hat based desktop since Mandrake but I did like CentOS a lot for servers.

Re: Debian and firmware

#89

Post by hypothesis »

mjg59 wrote: post #74
hypothesis wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is hardware becoming more complicated without being more capable? I just think that we’re taking lots of things for granted nowadays, which require complexity to be managed successfully. ROM to firmware creep is understandable, given flexibility that you mentioned. But to an end-user, is there a difference between having a blob in ROM vs firmware, if both are closed source?

> Is hardware becoming more complicated without being more capable? I don't think so. Every component on my system that runs firmware is significantly more complicated than the iterations that didn't. 802.11ax is much harder than 802.11b, for instance. > But to an end-user, is there a difference between having a blob in ROM vs firmware, if both are closed source? Yeah, bugs that are discovered after release can be fi…

> Yeah, bugs that are discovered after release can be fixed.

I definitely understand that real benefit.

But I was questioning the premise that having blob in ROM is somehow better than needing same blob in firmware, simply because that one doesn’t need/want to distribute non-free firmware on media.

If one wanted libre hardware, then both cases are not great.

Re: Debian and firmware

#90

Post by jeltz »

techie128 wrote: post #79
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_…

> If users never brush up against the inconvenience they'll be much less likely to seek out hardware alternatives I think you got it backwards. Users will seek out SOFTWARE alternatives. They're easier to change than the hardware. They're likelier to go the Ubuntu or Linux Mint route than to die on a Debian hill.

Do we? I switched from Dell to Lenovo due to issues with drivers.
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