1. https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-...
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22972661
*Edited
Watching this snap thing play out, and in the past, watching Mir, Unity, and Amazon Lens, has provided steady confirmation that I've made the right decision to stay away from Ubuntu.
Time to check out Debian!
*Edited. I can't type on phones.
Pop! is Ubuntu-based, so no idea of the situation with all these other problems, but it intrigues me because they're doing tiling windows first-class.
My understanding of Void is that it doesn't use snaps or systemd, making the system as a whole significantly easier to understand, and simply sounds much much closer to what I want out of a computer (and much like 8.04 was when I first switched to Ubuntu).
I left Ubuntu almost ten years ago, after 5 years of using it, when they started using MIR instead of Gnome2 and I replaced it with Linux Mint and I haven't looked back. This whole snap thing looks like the new weird decision made by Canonical to make their faithful users leave :/
Debian's problem is that it's stodgy updating policy means 'Stable' is still on 4.19, things like Wireguard require a simple, but odd procedure to request apt pull packages from newer releases, and most of the copy/pasteable examples out there assume Ubuntu, and their versions/customization to critical infrastructure packages.
IMHO, the stodgy updates make it a perfect candidate for server based software. Personally, my Debian know-how makes it great for my desktop, and It has not failed for my use case: Development, Sysadmin, Browsers, Steam (or any other games releasing linux versions)
That's not a good idea, as it breaks the assurance that Debian Stable provides. Using the backports repository is the recommended approach if you need a newer version of some clearly-defined piece of software. It will pull the newer dependencies it requires from backports, while still relying on stock-provided packages as far as practicable.
I tried it. Long story short, now I'm on Sid.
It is true that the first-presented installer ISO images on Debian's downloads page lack the worst proprietary drivers, but another couple of clicks takes you to images with them included. So, worst case, you find that the image you have lacks such a needed driver, and you use another image. In practice, I just start with the latter, and have not encountered hardware not covered. For the absolute newest equipment, a "testing" installer may be the right version to use.
The Debian download pages provide installer images for all needs. I have not needed to look at secondary sites, which also exist for specialized needs.
On my older 2011-era laptop, that's the wifi and wired network that need those drivers. It's a bit of a pain.
Not really. Debian also offers one with all the firmware included but explicitly labels it "unofficial" (though very much official in practice and hosted on debian servers). The "pain" is thus literally to click on another download link.
I think it's an over-zealous position from Debian not to redistribute firmware. Even systems that are very strict about licensing, like OpenBSD, redistribute firmware, because they have some common sense.
OTOH I believe it's a position fully aligned with their ethical standpoint. Equating common sense with your personal preference isn't very gracious.
If you want something that's less zealous about respecting (and eschewing) stupid licensing, but is more zealous about randomly upgrading all your software packages unexpectedly, there's always Ubuntu.
What exactly do you achieve by refusing to load it? Are you more free in one case and not the other?
https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware
you could perhaps offer to update that page to remove the ambiguities you believe exist.
For all intents and purposes, firmware is like a key or a password you must supply to the device to make it work. The driver, which is indeed open-source, just says: "here, device, is the firmware you need". That's it. You are not achieving anything useful at all by making people go through some ceremony to download it separately. Maybe they just want to send the signal that people should buy devices where the firmware is already burned into ROM or ASIC or whatever?
Firmware is typically copyrighted, large, obfuscated, and executable on your system.
A password is a string that you can examine and offers no intrinsic threat - either exploit, or legal.
As per the link I provided to you, Debian's policy is that free firmware are shipped in the distribution -- non-free firmware requires you add the 'non-free' and/or 'contrib' parameters to your repository lists.
There is no need to wildly speculate about the motivations of the Debian team -- eg 'send a signal people should buy certain devices' -- when their motivation is explicitly stated.
The DFSG dictates non-free software will not part of the standard distribution. But they've made it easy to pull those files in (as above) via a one word addition to one line of your sources.list file.