this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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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.
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linux-libre is harder because if you want cpu ucode plus hardware firmware support in general so that you can make your bad citizen hardware work, you'll need to add it out of the linux package.
Someone mentioned Guix as a gnu + linux distribution was hard, and in general that's true, but not because of linux-libre since there's a non official Guix repository providing non libre/free cpu ucode plus hardware firmware, see:
https://gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix
The complex part of Guix comes from it being a inmutable distribution based on the ideas from NixOS, though it's not a fork from Nix since it's even based on Guile rather than the Nix language, but their packages and configurations are quite different than any other distribution, the same as its inmutable system and I believe on both reproducibility is a thing...
But bottom line, for Guix you can even get packages to make linux-libre work with your hardware provided you find the corresponding firmware in the non official repo, and in general (not just Guix) as long as you find the firmware somewhere else (not in linux-libre) you would be OK, and depending on your distro that might be a really hard task.
I use Artix, and though I haven't explored it yet, I've been wondering how hard it'd be to install linux-libre, and get the strictly required firmware from the AUR, perhaps it's possible. The package is actually offered from AUR: