On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 12:04:19AM +0000, Ben Goodger wrote:
> I was and am in favour of shipping vital non-free drivers, but unlike nearly
> every other distro Debian does not ship unnecessary non-free software. When
> Ubuntu started doing that, I jumped ship.
I believe Ubuntu always did that.
<rant length="verbose" type="essay" style="neil-williams">
Ubuntu recently decided that 3d acceleration was vital functionality, in order to ship unnecessary non-free graphics drivers with Feisty. They then retracted that, apparently since Compiz is too much of an embarrassment to be included by default and its non-inclusion nullifies the need for proprietary graphics drivers.
My policy remains that:
Certain e.g. networking drivers are vital for a system's operation and should be shipped though easily removable. Other things, such as Adobe Flash Player, nvidia-glx, etc are not vital and the user should have to make their own affirmative decision to use them. Both should be distributed within APT repositories, for the sake not only of user choice and facilitation but of of trying to at least wrap the blobs up in debian-shaped packing so they behave as nicely as can be expected.
Ubuntu violated this policy, as well as annoying me with stability loss, unmaintained packages, commercialisation, patronisation and ignoring their Debian roots over the past two releases. That's why it went.
Obviously, gNewSense would be a very good applicant for use on Dell hardware (Ubuntu-inherited nastiness aside) if it can provide 100% hardware support for Dells. I am not confident that it is capable of this, but Debian is certainly capable of running all the hardware connected to my system out-of-box (notably unlike Windows, requiring two hours and eight driver discs.) This is why I prefer Debian in general, and is why I favoured Debian in the Dell survey.
Actually, though, I don't want anything preinstalled on my computers. Given Dell's track record of bundling useless rubbish on their Windows machines, I would not trust them not to fiddle with a Debian install. The trick, then, is to get Dell to use hardware supported well by, say, kernel
2.6.15 and above. This is likely the real issue for sysadmins: confidence in their hardware's ability to be run by their choice of OS without inane tweakage.
</rant>
