@lispi314 >Servers tend to have more of such issues than consumergrade hardware.
Yep, but generally people go looking for a specific server board to purchase or used server they want and they can just choose wisely.

Intel makes many server NIC's and most of those work fine without proprietary software like the ones used in the KGPE-D16.

>Doesn't the installer explicitly ask if you want proprietary software?
It doesn't.

It installs *all* the proprietary software it guesses that your hardware could use *without asking* via an "install-firmware" script that doesn't even output clearly what has been installed (you have to look under /lib/firmware to see what was installed) and also auto-enables the "nonfree-firmware" repo, meaning the package manager also recommends proprietary software by default.

Such script will install all of the proprietary intel microcode updates if it detects an intel CPU - even on a VM where those cannot be used.

There is a poorly-documented boot flag, which you can manually set to "firmware=never" and then the "install-firmware" script won't run, but the existence of such is buried in the documentation and is not listed on the installer page.

>Though it /does/ boot with it by default, yes.
Yes, the only available installer iso contains all the proprietary software.