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 drive the point home.

Yes, I agree that a default Debian configuration should be clean. But I also know the reality of needing at least Atheros (Wifi), Intel (Ethernet), and NVIDIA firmware blobs to get my tower to boot correctly. Not including any firmware repository on the CD or on a fully installed system is just a recipe for users to get frustrated while they are trying to follow a half-outdated tutorial on one of those spammy tech support blogs.

So in my opinion, the most common blobs should be cached by default, but not activated by default. If the machine boots without them, they can be deleted upon first reboot. If not, we can let the user decide if they are willing to compromise their principles in order to boot the system ;)

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. Actually there are Zip files containing all firmware for a release, which can be added to a USB drive and added during install, but it's not well documented.

Maybe, this Zip files can be made more prominent, and using them can be better documented. Yes, it's not including firmware in the CD, but it's a good compromise.

What about a nice tool (akin to GRML2USB) which writes the ISO to USB and leaves a mountable FAT32 partition where user can drop in the firmware.zip file, so it becomes self contained if user wants?

[0]: http://ftp.tr.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/non-free/

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/image...

The blog post is putting the idea of adding the firmware blobs into the official ISO files, and as a Debian user, I'm not comfortable with that.

So, I'm offering another trade-off: "Make inclusion of firmware blobs to installation media on the fly easier, keep firmware off the official ISOs". It's a bit of a DIY solution, but it doesn't need flexing policies, DFSG and the values Debian is standing for.

It's a thin but important line to cross for me.

This has been the case since the SI chipsets in 2012. I'm not sure if the fault lies fully with the driver, maybe the hardware doesn't allow querying the state of the engine firmware before enabling the engine.

At /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-radeon.conf:

     Section "Device"
 identifier "Radeon"
 Driver "modesetting"
    EndSection

TTY works well before and after KMS.

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, disconnect phone, run "tasksel", select whatever you want to install to finish install.

Having done this "detour" for many years now, it's "automatic" for me, and takes barely 3 minutes longer than the "normal" install from the IsoWithNonFree. I usually want "backports" enabled, so going into "expert mode" is required anyway.

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.

This is an immediate and direct contradiction.

The choice is literally between the non free firmware or your wifi and ethernet cards will not work.

That's why I believe the most common firmware .deb packages should be cached during installation so that they are on-disk in case they are needed.

Back in my early Linux days I had an issue where the default Ubuntu/Debian installer would come up with a garbled display and I'd have to use `vga=...` or `nomodeset` (or similar, can't remember) to get a proper console going. Once installed I would install a package and it would "just work".

A way to directly boot into an environment with non-free firmware available could help and the user doesn't lose any more freedom if they're already determined to use non-free firmware post-install anyway.

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?

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.)

It's so funny that this doesn't affect you at all but merely making the platform more accessible "significantly impacts" your loyalty.

Doesn't that mean your loyalty was conditional anyway? You are ready to jump ship if anything you don't like changes, even if it doesn't have anything to do with your system. Some loyalty.

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.

Life is too short to depend on people that don't want to support your use-case.

I found in the end, proceeding to install and then post-install patching was easier but tedious.

If you have access to USB slots, this is a non-problem. If it were possible to find and make and maintain "CD with a bit of the blobset glued in" I'd be happier frankly.

As mentioned in my original comment, those images already exist, and are linked to on the Debian installation page.

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/image...

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.

If we look at popcon[1], it currently says 11.84% of users who opted into popcon regularly use the "firmware-misc-nonfree" package, along with 9.57% for the realtek package, 8.76% for the modern Intel wifi firmware package (iwlwifi), and 7.07% for firmware-amd-graphics.

I can't claim that's a statistically significant percentage of Debian users, I don't have that data, but of the ones who volunteered their information, even assuming perfect overlap, a not insignificant number of users are happily opting into the "not officially Debian, we swear" portion of the world.

[1] - https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firmware-nonfree

I've made a conscious choice to install the non free packages. I'm quite happy I had that choice, but I'm even happier that they weren't forced on me.

I certainly hope nobody will point to me and say "look here, non-free should obviously be the default!"

Personally, while I would prefer to be able to change and replace the software running on the tiny computers that make up a modern system, focusing on the distinction between "the vendor shipped it on a flash chip so we don't have to think about it" and "we need to load it at runtime" seemed a bit like spending too much effort on too little reward, to me - if we convince the manufacturer to up the cost by a few cents to hide the firmware blob from us, is that really a victory for Free Software, simply because we don't have to think about it? (Particularly if it sometimes results in never having ready access to a mechanism to replace the firmware blob, should someone sufficiently motivated either convince them to Free it or develop a replacement?)

It's great whenever someone develops replacements bits or, even more rarely, convinces a company to release their firmware bits permissively, but without a list of examples of Debian's stance changing the policies of other organizations, I think it's not that effective a tool for changing behavior in this case, and instead primarily inconveniences people who want to use Debian.

Whether they end up changing the default behavior or not, people in this thread replying "wait, there are firmware-bundled images?" makes me think Debian should either stop making them or stop making them so unintuitive to discover.

The Web has plenty of tutorials explaining the installation process and the difference between the official ISO and the non-free ISO, even though I would love a better Debian Wiki.

Maybe it's a bit of gatekeeping, but popularity by itself shouldn't be the goal for Debian. You don't know how to install Debian, you don't want to search for a tutorial first, you won't let someone more knowledgeable to help you? Well, I believe this is not the best place for you, you'll face worse things on the road if you keep using Linux.

(But, of course, this isn't an uncompromisable principle, as evidenced by the existence of the non-free repository. Packaging basic firmware on the same image as the rest of the system isn't the unthinkable action that people are talking about, but silently running them would be.)

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.

Have been using Debian as my daily driver for 5+ years on both desktops and laptops. No issues at all though I did spend some time on gnome shell to get it closer to what I prefer (multiple desktops, alt-tab behaviour, etc)

The installation process, that I have to run when a local disk eventually fails is insignificant compared to constantly fixing shit. (And yes, it's not a nice process - even worse because every time I run it, it changed.)

I don't care about FOSS, so the principles are not a motivation for me.

Having said that, my reason for preferring firmware freedom mainly isn't principle; it's that non-free firmware potentially deprives me of control of my own equipment. By turning it's nose up at non-free firmware, Debian increases incentives for people to buy equipment that depends less on these blobs. That in turn incentivises manufacturers to offer equipment that doesn't depend on blobbiness.

I realise that these incentives are strictly at the margin; but Debian is the only leading distro that takes a hard line on these matters. If Debian were to retire from the battlefield, nobody would be left standing except the closed-firmware hardware makers. That would make me sad.

Actually, it only incentives people to buy and manufacturers to offer equipment which has the exact same blobs on a NAND chip on the equipment itself. It's more convenient, sure, since there's no need to find a copy of (the correct version of) the blob and load it together with the driver, but it still depends on these blobs.