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0 pointsjacquesm2y ago0 comments

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) and I'm all for compromise when it helps out others.

At the same time, you have a good point, these decisions are difficult and need to be very carefully weighted. Debian and RedHat are the two distributions that everybody else always ends up following so a major departure from established policy there has potentially huge impact downstream.

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enriquto2y ago

> 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) ?

jacquesmOP2y ago

Winmodems had plenty of alternatives, for PCs the choice is usually limited to 'what you were given' or 'what you recycled from a dumpster'. Linux is typically not the first OS to be installed on any given piece of hardware (even if brand new plenty of people pay either the MS or the Apple tax). And because those are exactly the people that benefit from having a working PC I'm all for maximizing their chances. Choice is a luxury.

Karellen2y ago

> Linux is typically not the first OS to be installed on any given piece of hardware. And because those are exactly the people that benefit from having a working PC I'm all for maximizing their chances. Choice is a luxury.

But they don't have to choose Debian.

If Debian had maintained a strict "Free" stance, people could still use their troublesome hardware out-of-the-box simply by picking another distro that did include non-Free firmware in the installer. There are plenty of them. Like, 99% of all other distros.

Not all distros have to be everything to everyone. It's OK to have a niche.

3 more replies

nunesvn2y ago

We’re on the laptop age, most people can’t pick and choose the components of their computers.

boricj2y ago

Usually, people first buy a computer and then hear about Linux later, not the other way around.

5e92cb50239222b2y ago

It's also close to impossible to choose fully Linux-compatible hardware for some of us. Whatever decent Thinkpads there are left are practically unavailable in my country, unless you're willing to buy from foreign sellers without any warranty and pay hundreds of dollars for shipping. Things like Framework are completely unavailable and probably will be for the foreseeable future. I use desktops exclusively so I can pick and choose, but I am in the minority of a minority.

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