I like the debian way with a separate repo for the non-free things needed for the hardware to function, so it’s not all or nothing. I want my wifi to work, but beyond things like that I only want free software.
Debian was interesting with their back port / forward port repos for drivers on newer hardware. I had to grab a wifi driver and put it on a USB stick, then figure out the dir to put it in so I didn’t have to manually modprobe or whatever to manually load the driver.
20 years ago on fedora I had to manually mod probe like three different drivers to get my PCMCIA Broadcom wifi card to work. I’m sure fedora is better by now, but damn I still have bad memories about that.
I like the debian way with a separate repo for the non-free things needed for the hardware to function, so it’s not all or nothing. I want my wifi to work, but beyond things like that I only want free software.
Debian was interesting with their back port / forward port repos for drivers on newer hardware. I had to grab a wifi driver and put it on a USB stick, then figure out the dir to put it in so I didn’t have to manually modprobe or whatever to manually load the driver.
20 years ago on fedora I had to manually mod probe like three different drivers to get my PCMCIA Broadcom wifi card to work. I’m sure fedora is better by now, but damn I still have bad memories about that.