"We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of programs that don't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our FTP archive for this software."
I had it running on a couple of my machines about 1 or 2 years ago and an update came in for WiFi that bricked them. I started looking into rolling back or whatever and just decided to switch those to Ubuntu (or Kubuntu actually) and they work great and have has no issues.
How are they "only tacitly" acknowledging it? Looks like they have put in very tangible solutions in place already.
Debian 12 even made a dedicated non-free-firmware repo for free software purists who would like to concede having non-free drivers just so they can use their hardware.
They've now relaxed their (stupid) policy so at least the default ISO includes non-free drivers.
When it comes to an already installed system, enabling the non-free repos and installing linux-firmware (or more specific firmware-* package for your hardware) should fix it.
If the default ISO already included non-free drivers, why would you have to separately enable the non-free repos to get firmware?
My Debian 12 install didn't come with proprietary Nvidia drivers, nor did it ask me if I wanted them during installation. I had to enable the non-free-firmware repo to get them.
> If the default ISO already included non-free drivers, why would you have to separately enable the non-free repos to get firmware?
I'm not 100% sure about this but I believe it may enable it for you automatically if non-free firmware was used during the install. I mentioned it just in case.
> My Debian 12 install didn't come with proprietary Nvidia drivers
The primary problem of the previous non-free driver policy is the lack of network drivers which make it impossible to install nor download the drivers even if you somehow managed to install the OS. This is now resolved.
It's not a big deal if the ISO doesn't include every non-free driver out there as long as you can manually install it after the fact.
The default ISO didn't come with non-free drivers until the latest release (12, bookworm). Unless you used the "unofficial" image which did include them. Now the situation is different.
Here is the relevant part from the release notes:
> In most cases firmware is non-free according to the criteria used by the Debian GNU/Linux project and thus cannot be included in the main distribution. If the device driver itself is included in the distribution and if Debian GNU/Linux legally can distribute the firmware, it will often be available as a separate package from the non-free-firmware section of the archive (prior to Debian GNU/Linux 12.0: from the non-free section).
> However, this does not mean that such hardware cannot be used during installation. Starting with Debian GNU/Linux 12.0, following the 2022 General Resolution about non-free firmware, official installation images can include non-free firmware packages. By default, debian-installer will detect required firmware (based on kernel logs and modalias information), and install the relevant packages if they are found on an installation medium (e.g. on the netinst). The package manager gets automatically configured with the matching components so that those packages get security updates. This usually means that the non-free-firmware component gets enabled, in addition to main.
https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/paxj85/why_debian_w...
"We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of programs that don't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our FTP archive for this software."
I had it running on a couple of my machines about 1 or 2 years ago and an update came in for WiFi that bricked them. I started looking into rolling back or whatever and just decided to switch those to Ubuntu (or Kubuntu actually) and they work great and have has no issues.