[conspire] test drive of new laptop

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> So I will easily be able to test the new laptop.  If it passes, I will
> do the install to internal drive.  If not, I have the receipt in a
> safe place.  As others have indicated, Ubuntu probably has the drivers
> (if they exist).   If I install Debian, I have to do some thinking
> about the purity of FOSS vs. non-free.   At least the Linux world
> gives each of us choices.

Both Ubuntu and Debian have policies that greatly restrict or prohibit
making proprietary drivers & firmware available in the main installer
images.  (There are easy workarounds when you need something not
included, but certainly it can be an annoyance, such as whenever I was
reinstalling from scratch onto a machine that needed the Broadcom b43
firmware image file.  It's really not brain surgery, though:  You just
find the appropriate .deb, put it on a USB stick, and supply it during
the install.)

If you really care about that matter, you should look to variants such
as Linux Mint that pointedly include all the proprietary drivers &
firmware images they can.