Re: [H-source-users] Shall we remove debian from h-node?

[bill-auger]

so the day has arrived - debian published their new release yesterday; andas
promised, all installers contain non-free firmware

i went through the install process twice, though to thoroughly test the
behavior would require more (with and without some non-free harwrare present,
for example) - there are also about a dozen different ISOs to choose from - i
looked at only three - that was enough IMHO, to reach a conclusion

i went through the install process twice, because the ISOs include two distinct
installer programs (the classic debian-installer and the graphical calamares
installer)

the debian-installer is a non-default option on the bootloader menu - the
calamares installer is the one presented most prominently when the default boot
option is selected (boot into a live desktop system)

i ran the experiment in QEMU, which should not have exposed any hardware
requiring non-free modules

the debian-installer did not install any non-free packages, nor did it
subscribe the installed system to the non-free repos

the calamares installer however, was disappointing - it offered no options to
select which software was to be installed

the installed system was subscribed to the non-free repos; and there were over
1300 non-free firmware packages installed (presumably that is every non-free
firmware debian distributes), though again, none of the system hardware
required any

i discussed this with some debian members last year, and they assumed that
there would be some warning and an option to opt-out of the non-free packages,
even if some hardware was detected to require it - the installer simply
installed them without mentioning it, even though none were needed

my conclusion is that if the installer keeps that behavior, all new debian
installs would give a false-positive "it works", for every hardware device that
debian supports - as discussed previously in this thread, we could make h-node
more rigorous, by white-listing known-free kernel modules - then debian (or
_any_ other distro) would not be able to give false positives; but there
is no longer any justification to distinguish debian from any other distro - is
now no different more acceptable than any other