On 17.01.21 11:51, Marc Haber wrote: > On Sat, 16 Jan 2021 20:20:56 +0100, Andreas Tille <andr...@an3as.eu> > wrote: >> IMHO the fact that people claim that >> "Ubuntu is easy to use but Debian is not" is to quite some amount based >> on this kind of experience of users who do not know that kind of basics >> and are not able to fix a rudimentary system afterwards. > > Absolutely. The Installation Experience is one of the first contacts > with the distribution for most people¹, and since we all know that the > first five seconds decide whether it's gonna be love or hate, we > should not be trying THIS hard to be a failure in this very important > part of the relationship our product is building with the user.
It's not very relevant today anymore, but my first Linux distributions (including Debian) were actually store-bought. If we had needed to rely on firmware back then (which we did not) and would it not have been included in the box, the user would have been pretty much out of luck. Especially on the networking side. I guess the end result is the equivalent of shipping a separate driver disk with all the non-free bits. :( The FSF also kinda muddied the waters with its stance on it being ok to have soft-updatable firmware in EEPROMs but insisting that it is not ok to load firmware on demand post-boot. At the same time efforts like SOF which try to offer open firmware are interesting. But then we still end up with the firmware in non-free, of course, as it needs to be signed for the most common DSPs - and cannot be rebuilt reproducibly. I guess we are not the target here either but instead it's for vendors basing their firmware on one common architecture. So even when we get close, we don't seem to get all the way. :( Kind regards Philipp Kern
