[Image description: A fox-woman wearing a dress the color of the Debian logo is being pulled by the sleeves on one side by a gnu man and on the other side bu a penguin. She has an annoyed expression.
The gnu man says: “Debian, why do you offer a non-free firmware repo?
You’re so close to being one of the few fully free distros…
Don’t you believe in free software?”
The penguin says: “Why isn’t the necessary firmware
installed by default ?
It’s such a pain when you install
and it can’t connect to network…
You’re so close to being practical,
Debian !” ]
Not only is Debian absolutely correct in offering a non-free repo, any distro destined at desktop usage should leave it enabled by default.
Nothing wrong with a distro that’s built entirely on free software. But if you believe this is ever going to be how actual people use their computers, you’re delusional. You might also become obsessed with the name given to an operating system that became extremely popular using (optionally) some of your components, driving you nuts.
I’ve argued this for point for so many years and have become exhausted to the point where I don’t even bother any more.
Free software advocates, God bless them, are fighting a good fight but we will never see the average computer user giving up functionality for the sake of some computing ideology; whether that ideology be free software, privacy or security focused. I’m glad some people are willing to do so as I believe strongly that the world would not be where it is today if it weren’t for it’s existence offer the last two or three decades. But the reality is that 90% of the world views computers, phones and tablets as tools; a means to achieving an end, not the end in and of itself. There may be some subset of people who are willing to give up some convenience or utility if they believe strongly enough in one of these ideologies, but most of them will never care about the license of their software as long as it gets the job done. But this is precisely why we need people who do care about these ideologies because software freedom ultimately is important and people do benefit from it. It just needs to be as good as, if not better than, it’s non-free counterparts
I look at it like this: the percentage of most people directly using FOSS vs proprietary software is 0%.
If I can get them to use even one piece of FOSS software, that increases the percentage, which is a win for FOSS.
I moved my parents onto Linux Mint a few months ago. They still use Spotify, Gmail, Chrome, Outlook, Onedrive, etc. But they are doing that through Linux, and I got them to switch their office suite from MS Office to OnlyOffice.
So instead of them being 100% on proprietary software, they are now using Linux, which protects them from malware and Microsofts spyware and bs, and makes them aware slightly of FOSS and how good it can be.
That is a net win as far as I can see. FOSS usage just increased slightly, and proprietary decreased, no other tradeoffs were made.
I’m glad some folks actually “get it”.
Computers are tools to get stuff done. It’s ok to be a big FOSS advocate, but when you put your need to be a absolutist over practicality, you really lost the real world use of things.
I am a very early Linux adopter (Red Hat Halloween) and I remember standing up my system piece by piece. It was fun back then but now I’ve got better things to do. Now I just install Pop!_OS and I am 98% of the way there.
If I was in my early twenties again, and trying to learn and tinker, then I would absolutely be running Arch or full FOSS Debian build. Either would be running only the absolute necessary software and nothing more. Just like I use to do it back in the day.