Debian 12 forsakes ethics for a more delightful installation experience

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

Content source

https://www.neowin.net/news/debian-12-forsakes-ethics-for-a-more-delightful-installation-experience/

Over the weekend, Debian 12 “Bookworm” became available for download. For the first time, Debian users with hardware that relies on non-free firmware can download the operating system using the official ISOs, now that the non-free firmware is included by default.

The primary benefit of including non-free firmware in the official ISOs is that Wi-Fi and graphics hardware should work out of the box. Before, you had to grab one of the Debian project’s unofficial ISOs to use non-free firmware.

Aside from being a helluva lot easier to install, Debian 12 has updated software packages including GNOME 43, KDE Plasma 5.27, LXDE 11, LXQt 1.2.0, MATE 1.26, and Xfce 4.18. In terms of programs, we have Emacs 28.2, GIMP 2.10.34, LibreOffice 7.4, Linux 6.1, Vim 9.0, Firefox ESR and more.

The supported architectures include i386, amd64, arm64, armel, EABI hard-float ABI, armhf, mipsel, mips64el, ppc64el, s390x. On arm64, Secure Boot has been reintroduced for added security benefits. Of these architectures, most people will want the amd64 version as this is for 64-bit PCs.

Debian Stable releases such as Debian 12 are generally regarded as rock solid. Not only that but Debian 12 will be supported for the next five years thanks to the Debian Security and Debian Long Term Support teams.

Debian 12 forsakes ethics for a more delightful installation experience

Debian 12 landed over the weekend. It comes with lots of updated software packages and desktop environments plus support for many architectures. For the first time, it ships with non-free firmware.

www.neowin.net

 

[MuzzMelbourne]

Sorry... I don't understand what they mean "forsakes ethics"?

Providing an easier set-up experience for, assumably, paying customer's sounds reasonable to me. Am I missing something here...?

 

[Gandalf_The_Grey]

Debain only used free and open source software, that made them special and stand out.
Now they "gave in" by including non-free firmware by default.
A wise choice IMO, but also a change of philosophy.

 

[wat0114]

First chance I get, I'll give this release a test drive from a Live usb.

 

[Alhaitham]

Love Debian, hope this makes things easier for newcomers

 

[wat0114]

Finally I was able to get Bookworm installed alongside MX-21 and Windows 11. The major hurdle I had to overcome was trying to encrypt the root drive during installation, which is not nearly as easy as it was for MX-21 and Lubuntu. Finally I came across an excellent guide on how to do this here:

** https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/146vw37/guide_install_debian_with_encrypted_root_and/

** Had to de-link URL because it didn't post correctly for some reason.

My partitions layout looks like this:

As you can see, I also encrypted the swap partition, which was advised during the installation, because encrypted file contents in and encrypted system can reside in memory which can be swapped to disk. I never knew this before.

The next hurdle I encountered was that the Discover Software Center was missing all the repositories, other than the useless cdrom link. After some frustrating time searching Google, I finally found that my sources.list under /etc/apt was missing them all. I used Nano editor to add them:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free-firmware

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main non-free-firmware

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates main non-free-firmware

I've tailored Appearance and Workspace behavior to my liking and also installed KeepassXC. Next I will install Snap and flatpak backends.

EDIT

forgot to mention it's KDE Plasma v5.27.5