[rincebrain]

I think the question becomes, are people using Debian in large part because of those principles, or in spite of the inconveniences that come with them because of other benefits (e.g. it's a fairly well-maintained, stable Linux distribution, that very aggressively believes if something worked on 11.0 it better still work on 11.9)?

If we look at popcon[1], it currently says 11.84% of users who opted into popcon regularly use the "firmware-misc-nonfree" package, along with 9.57% for the realtek package, 8.76% for the modern Intel wifi firmware package (iwlwifi), and 7.07% for firmware-amd-graphics.

I can't claim that's a statistically significant percentage of Debian users, I don't have that data, but of the ones who volunteered their information, even assuming perfect overlap, a not insignificant number of users are happily opting into the "not officially Debian, we swear" portion of the world.

[1] - https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=firmware-nonfree

[scbrg]

Speaking as someone who is part of this "significant percentage of Debian users", I'd like to point out that opting in is the key part in the phrase "happily opting into".

I've made a conscious choice to install the non free packages. I'm quite happy I had that choice, but I'm even happier that they weren't forced on me.

I certainly hope nobody will point to me and say "look here, non-free should obviously be the default!"

[rincebrain]

I don't think anyone is proposing removing the ability to not install with nonfree packages, merely whether the default should remain as it is.

Personally, while I would prefer to be able to change and replace the software running on the tiny computers that make up a modern system, focusing on the distinction between "the vendor shipped it on a flash chip so we don't have to think about it" and "we need to load it at runtime" seemed a bit like spending too much effort on too little reward, to me - if we convince the manufacturer to up the cost by a few cents to hide the firmware blob from us, is that really a victory for Free Software, simply because we don't have to think about it? (Particularly if it sometimes results in never having ready access to a mechanism to replace the firmware blob, should someone sufficiently motivated either convince them to Free it or develop a replacement?)

It's great whenever someone develops replacements bits or, even more rarely, convinces a company to release their firmware bits permissively, but without a list of examples of Debian's stance changing the policies of other organizations, I think it's not that effective a tool for changing behavior in this case, and instead primarily inconveniences people who want to use Debian.

Whether they end up changing the default behavior or not, people in this thread replying "wait, there are firmware-bundled images?" makes me think Debian should either stop making them or stop making them so unintuitive to discover.

[ajot]

I'm a Debian desktop user for both principles and stability. I try to use free software only, but I use the non-free ISO when installing onto a new machine, because I need it to work in the first place.

The Web has plenty of tutorials explaining the installation process and the difference between the official ISO and the non-free ISO, even though I would love a better Debian Wiki.

Maybe it's a bit of gatekeeping, but popularity by itself shouldn't be the goal for Debian. You don't know how to install Debian, you don't want to search for a tutorial first, you won't let someone more knowledgeable to help you? Well, I believe this is not the best place for you, you'll face worse things on the road if you keep using Linux.

[marcosdumay]

It's not that simple. Debian is the way it is because of its principles. You can't remove the principles and keep everything else working the same way.

(But, of course, this isn't an uncompromisable principle, as evidenced by the existence of the non-free repository. Packaging basic firmware on the same image as the rest of the system isn't the unthinkable action that people are talking about, but silently running them would be.)

[lmm]

I'd expect opting into popcon and not caring about freeness to be highly correlated.

[yrro]

I wish it were possible to view those installation counts as a percentage of systems which are non-virtual!