Subject: Re: bug#58357: [Patch staging ] doc add a recommended system in 'Hardware Considerations'

From: "pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2022 19:09:20 +0200

Hello!  Some comments:

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:
> This discussion and others we had at the Ten Years of Guix event makes
> me think we should strive to avoid bad surprises by being more
> explicit.  Concretely, we could:
>
>   • Under “Hardware Considerations”, list common devices known not to
>     work without non-free {firm,soft}ware, such as Intel Wifi (iwlwifi).
>     We cannot be exhaustive but we should at least mention common
>     problems with recent x86_64 laptops.

My impression is that the dire wifi situation is explained well enough
in Hardware Considerations already.

On other common problems, even if I no longer agree with all I wrote at
<https://issues.guix.gnu.org/36786>, I remember that others claimed
somewhere that not all AMD GPUs are bad, and h-node says some Intel
integrated graphics are indeed not working, so it is not easy to
generalize when it comes to GPUs.

>   • Under “Hardware Considerations”, make the list of devices known to
>     work clearer, in tabular form, perhaps expanding it.

There is a list of image types like novena and pine64.  The Pinebook
image is even on the website, which is kind of more prominent than the
manual.  Then there also are bootloaders for some devices in the Guix
source code (not prominent at all).

By the way, it did play a part when my family bought an odroid c2 that
Guix had a bootloader for it, then there came a commit

commit 2bb915e679b8a9e071f15b4caa3274fe9c6396c1
Author: Efraim Flashner <[email-masked]>
Date:   Thu Apr 19 17:24:40 2018 +0300

    gnu: u-boot-odroid-c2: Remove variable.
    
    U-boot for this target requires a binary blob to boot correctly.
    
    * gnu/packages/bootloaders.scm (u-boot-odroid-c2): Remove variable.

(There never was a recommendation for odroid though and we don’t regret
buying it.  But recommendations could be dangerous.)

>
>   • In the installer, print a message upfront when unusable devices are
>     found—typically Intel wifi.

Yes, I agree there should somehow be a warning for example if the
uvesafb module gets loaded.  I need to think about that.

Regards,
Florian