"I was under the illusion that Trisquel deliberately makes it harder to
install non-free firmware."
Nope. That is a bug in Linux-libre that Trisquel inherited from using the
Linux-libre deblob scripts. You see, when the non-free firmware isn't there
and the kernel tries to use it, that name of the firmware file gets logged
along with a "file not found" message. Alexandre Oliva, the maintainer of
Linux-libre, sees that as people's computers telling them to go install some
file because it's missing and thinks that this falls into the category of
"steering" people toward it.
So he found a way to avoid that problem by munging the file name so that it
isn't logged anymore. A side effect of that is the kernel won't load the
file, even if it's there, because the file name the kernel is wanting doesn't
match the name of the firmware that's installed.
It's entirely a side effect of trying to avoid steering people to non-free
things. Ideally a different method could be found. There's even an incomplete
patch on the Linux-libre mailing list to enable firmware loading without
steering people to it but it seems a low priority, especially since someone
that really wants to could un-munge the file names, re-build the kernel with
that change, and continue on with it happily loading the firmware.
