@SuperSnekFriend The truth - Debian went full proprietary in utter contempt of the users freedom; https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#Debian

The only installer now available contains proprietary malware that takes the users freedom (that's right, you download the Debian installer .iso and you don't have freedom, as it contains proprietary software that denies you freedom).

The installer proceeds to detect if the hardware could use proprietary software (even if it can't) and then permanently installs it *without even asking* or *without even telling the user what was installed* (you have to go and look under /lib/firmware to see what proprietary software was installed).

There is a poorly documented flag that disables the non-consensual malware installer, but that doesn't fix the problem of how the installer is proprietary software.


For now there are workarounds when you can use an archived old installer and upgrade, or you can manually install via de-bootstrap - but optionally free isn't enough, since after the first nonfree program is added to a system, more and more will keep getting put in and none of such proprietary malware is ever taken out (unless it becomes totally obsolete).

The next slide on the proprietary slope could be to merge "free" and "contrib" and then eventually merge it with "nonfree", but we'll see.