72
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2026
72 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
68215 readers
701 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
Good luck getting most wifi and bluetooth hardware working without these firmwares. :)
With AI they might pull it off using clean room reverse engineered Rust written slopfirmwares 😁
Well, that's why it's for the purists lol. Depending on the hardware you have/need it really is a pain. I use Guix but i still need the kernel from the nonguix channel. Nonguix does allow you to pick and choose firmware blobs, but on all my machines at the very least i need the amdgpu firmware. Wifi and bluetooth is something you could work around if you really wanted, but getting rid of the gpu firmware requires me to get a different laptop entirely, or in the case of my desktop get a different gpu, but i don't want to make that compromise cause finding a gpu that doesn't require that probably cuts into my gaming performance big time.
AMD integrates all of the drivers directly into Mesa by now.
Yeah but that's just the drivers, most modern cards still need proprietary firmware blobs to function.
I thought that only Nvidia is doing this. There goes my hope for a fully free PC. :(
Yeah i was confused by that at first too. Nvidia's drivers are also proprietary, but the firmware is an issue with both Nvidia and AMD. So far i've only experimented with firmware blobs on 2 machines, a desktop and a laptop, but on both of them i need firmware for amdgpu, and wifi/bluetooth. Everything else seems to work without it.
How is Guix? I'm on NixOS and have been thinking about making the swap. I set up a VM to fiddle with a bit and try to make configs for the transition and noticed some of my existing packages missing, but none of it was anything I couldn't live without, and I haven't even checked out nonguix yet. I haven't done much with it yet, but it at least seems viable.
So far it has been perfectly usable once you get the hang of it, but i do need nonguix for the kernel on actual hardware. Guix does have a smaller package repo, but they do have a Nix service that you can use to easily get the Nix package manager up and running and install packages through Nix if you need them.
A few months ago there was an issue with the nonguix substitute server that lasted for multiple weeks, so in that time if you wanted to update you had to compile the kernel yourself. I don't know if this is something that happens more often or if it was an unfortunate incident, but that did suck. Going forward though i'm planning on installing Guix on my server and with something that Guix calls "offloading", you can configure it so that a stronger machine can build your configuration, so that my poor laptop for example doesn't have to do the compiling lol.
Since Guix is more obscure it can be a bit more difficult to find answers in communities like Reddit, but on the flip side i feel like their documentation is better organized than Nix, and they provide code snippets in there as well to cover a lot of usecases you might have.
Another thing to keep in mind is the iso, cause since it's all libre by default without firmware blobs, unless you have a libre compatible system, you won't be able to render a graphical environment, and wifi on laptops can be an issue too. For my first install i used this old System Crafters iso and followed his guide to install it. At the moment i'm working on a helper script for myself that pulls in my config and runs some of the lengthy Guix commands i need, that i can then run after i install guix with the official iso, which should work cause even without firmware, you should be able to render a tty and the Guix installer also uses ncurses inside the tty. Hope this wasn't too lengthy of a reply lol, didn't realize i was going to be typing this much.
No, I appreciate it. It'll be useful when I finally get around to committing to it.
Just 'firmware', still. It never gets an S.