On Thu, Nov 24, 2022 at 06:17:23PM -0500, pa...@quillandmouse.com wrote: > On Thu, 24 Nov 2022 16:05:31 -0500 > Jeremy Hendricks <jwh1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I have no idea what you mean. It’s open source and you can analyze > > the code line by line. > > Does that include the blobs we're forced to run to make Nvidia cards > run really well?
No. There are basically three types of "software" in a modern desktop or laptop computer system: 1) Firmware. 2) Microcode. 3) Everything else. Firmware is "software" that gets loaded inside a device, such as a network interface, or a graphics chipset. It's executed by that device, and it tells the device how to function. Microcode is "software" that gets loaded inside the CPU, and is executed by the internal portions of the CPU. It's a lot like firmware for the CPU. Everything else (boot loader, kernel, init system, services, applications, and so on) gets executed by the CPU. When we talk about a distribution like Debian, this is the software that's in the Debian packages. > I also have to wonder why Ubuntu (a Debian derivative) seems to be > better at working on random hardware than straight Debian. Ubuntu and Debian have different policies regarding non-free firmware and microcode. Debian does not include these in the official installer, because they're not Free by Debian's definition. Ubuntu has a more relaxed policy, and *does* include non-free firmware in its installer. In addition to that, Ubuntu has a more frequent release cycle. At any given moment, on average, the "age" of Debian packages that matter for hardware support (kernel, X server, Wayland, video drivers, graphics libraries, etc.) is higher than the "age" of analogous Ubuntu packages. Of course, right after a Debian release, the "age" of its packages is going to be at a minimum, and Debian will be more likely to work on (relatively) newer hardware at that point. This changes over time, as we get further away from the last stable release date. Debian also has semi-official backported packages, that can help in many of these cases. See <https://backports.debian.org/> for details.
