this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
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Yeah, it's like an open-source distro that won't work without an accompanying opaque binary blob.
What distros are like this?
It is more a question of what hardware is like that and if you look up firmware blobs for Linux you'll find a lot, starting with graphic cards.
That's the hardware not the distro
Yeah and the hardware is what requires blobs regardless of the distro.
It wouldn't require blobs if the driver code were open-sourced.
Distro was the wrong word. I should have said "package" (though there are also distros that attempt to eliminate blobs within their packages). Examples include manufacturer-issued device drivers, software that allows integration of GPUs, several parts of Android that integrate with the underlying hardware, firmware of various sorts, and I can't be arsed to remember more at the moment.