Reply to post: Re: Not for noobs @kurkosdr

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Peter Gathercole Silver badge

Re: Not for noobs @kurkosdr

"Windows had the required driver bundled".

Ah. But did it? If you are saying that the install image provided by Acer had, then that is down to Acer. Did you try from a Microsoft raw install image? I often find that raw MS install images do not include the drivers for Laptop systems.

I recently put Win10 on an older HP laptop (one that HP does not provide Win10 drivers for, at least not officially), and although the system mostly functioned out of the box, there were about half-a-dozen unidentified devices after the base install, and I'm still unable to work out what one of them is.

And I actually put a demo version of Windows Server recently (the demo versions you download are always the latest) on some gash hardware I cobbled together, and I could not configure the network and display devices out of the box to allow it to connect to the network to download the drivers!

IIRC, that Broadcom driver on the Acer was particularly frustrating, because it involves a binary blob from Broadcom that is license encumbered with a license that makes it difficult to include by default in a Linux distribution. You (personally) can make the decision to put it on (by adding the PPA to the packaging system) but a distro provider can't without running the risk of being dragged through the courts.

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