81–90 of 241 posts
A bit offtopic... are there any distros besides PoPOS that comes with the proprietary Nvidia drivers preinstalled? I tried to use (live image) Debian on an RTX 4070 PC and nothing worked just black screen after GRUB. PoPOS works out of the box but honestly I'd prefer something more simple as Debian.
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> On the other, I can't help but feel we're losing something when even a purist distribution like Debian is forced to concede in the fight against proprietary firmware blobs. The software needs hardware to run, and the whole point of the software is to make the hardware useful. If you can't use the hardware, what's the point of the software? In my book, freedom is a function of usefulness. No amount of redistributabl…
I disagree. I'm very disappointed that this "necessity" came into existence in the first place. By being forced to install non-free BLOBs to be able to use "our" devices we actually admit that we're not the ones who actually control "our" computers. That's admitting full defeat! You're not the owner of "your" devices. Given that computers are now kind of "brain extensions" this means you're not in control of a substa…
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All kinds of things wrong? It’s the base for half the Linux distros. What could you possibly mean?
Half the Linux distris? I've once counted on Distrowatch. When you go by number of distris there it's more like 80% are Debian based. If you go also by how much those distris are used it's even like 9x% of the stuff running out there is Debian based. There are almost no independent distris. You have Arch, you have SUSE, you have RedHat and a few clones, you have Gentoo. But more or less everything else is Debian base…
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That and the simple fact that without it the hardware you've invested in won't work. So this is very much an individual choice, if you don't have such hardware you are fine but shouldn't be voting on whether or not someone who does have hardware that won't work without proprietary blobs has to go out to buy new gear. There are all kinds of considerations that go in to this decision (for instance: environmental impact…
> the simple fact that without it the hardware you've invested in won't work How is that different from the "if you want to run linux don't buy a winmodem" that we said convincingly twenty years ago ? Would you have approved that linux 2.0 added binary blobs to the kernel in order to correctly work with the hardware that you had invested in (some random winmodem) ?
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I cannot find install images without systemd and with sysvinit. Do I miss something?
That's because systemd is the default. You can choose sysvinit during installation https://wiki.debian.org/Init#Changing_the_init_system_-_at_i...
Maybe I'm asking too much, but for me "official" support would mean that I can do it from the installer directly, no terminals and chroots required.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/40705-but-the-plans-were-on...
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> the simple fact that without it the hardware you've invested in won't work How is that different from the "if you want to run linux don't buy a winmodem" that we said convincingly twenty years ago ? Would you have approved that linux 2.0 added binary blobs to the kernel in order to correctly work with the hardware that you had invested in (some random winmodem) ?
Usually, people first buy a computer and then hear about Linux later, not the other way around.
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I cannot find install images without systemd and with sysvinit. Do I miss something?
That's because systemd is the default. You can choose sysvinit during installation https://wiki.debian.org/Init#Changing_the_init_system_-_at_i...
Does anyone know if Bookworm includes the Ubuntu-Mate version of the Mate desktop?
https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/12gyjpg/debian_mate...
https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/13ueaub/debian_12_m...
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I disagree. I'm very disappointed that this "necessity" came into existence in the first place. By being forced to install non-free BLOBs to be able to use "our" devices we actually admit that we're not the ones who actually control "our" computers. That's admitting full defeat! You're not the owner of "your" devices. Given that computers are now kind of "brain extensions" this means you're not in control of a substa…
You don't control the hardware in the first place. Can you modify the microchips on your hardware? Can you modify the printed circuits? Can you modify a ROM in hardware? In all those cases the answer is "not really", short of some spectacular reverse engineering effort and specialized hardware and skills that even most technical users don't have (you can modify anything with enough effort). All this focus on firmware…
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I cannot find install images without systemd and with sysvinit. Do I miss something?
That's because systemd is the default. You can choose sysvinit during installation https://wiki.debian.org/Init#Changing_the_init_system_-_at_i...
But it seems the efforts to actually restore the compatibility of some components with sysvinit is from devuan, not debian. May be wrong again.
Those are steps in the right direction. But I stay alert: I know that sysvinit experience could be actually desastrous on debian compared to devuan. Not to mention the debian "default" is systemd: we all know how critical is the choice of the "default" on the long run, that's why I may still go to devuan.