On Tue, 2022-08-23 at 17:31 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote: > Antonio Terceiro <[email protected]> writes: > > > On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 10:53:46AM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote: > > > "Andrew M.A. Cater" <[email protected]> writes: > > > > > > > In practice, the free installer is useless on its own. > > > > > > That is not my experience -- I'm using Debian through its installer on a > > > number of laptops, desktops and servers, and for my purposes it works > > > fine and in general I have not needed to enable non-free/contrib for > > > hardware support. > > > > That's very interesting. Can you share the spec for those machines, and > > if possible point to where they can be bought? > > I use Dell R630 servers,
>From 2014 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PowerEdge_servers#Generation_13 > Talos II workstation, I'm not sure how old these are, but they are really expensive and seem to have a very small userbase. > HP ProLiant ML310e small server, The CPU is from 2011 according to https://ark.intel.com/content/www/de/de/ark/products/52269/intel-xeon-processor-e31220-8m-cache-3-10-ghz.html (I took the CPU from https://www.reichelt.de/de/de/hp-proliant-ml310e-gen8-v2-server-1-wahl-hp-pl-ml310e-p331526.html?r=1) > and Lenovo X200/X201 laptops. Yeah the laptop is 10+ years old, > but to be honest every time I try a modern laptop I don't notice any > real difference except fancier display and longer battery life, neither > of which I find important. > > Yes I am aware that I can install non-free firmware on the R630, but for > my purposes (VM host, CI/CD, fuzzing, crypto/math computations) they do > more harm than good so I chose not to. I don't think everyone can affort the energy (in)efficiency of a decade old hardware. Most users will also have more recent hardware; I don't know much 10+ years hardware still in productive use... Either way, such ancient hardware is probably not a good example for the firmware problem: it was a significantly smaller problem back then. Ansgar
