this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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Technology
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There's a reason why I wrote "not (fully) open source". Some drivers that get shipped with the Linux kernel aren't open source and it's very hard to completely avoid proprietary drivers.
By "shipped with the kernel", do you mean by the kernel people? Or just by distros?
Because I don't think the kernel people ship anything proprietary. Distros do, because distros are in the business of actually putting together a functional operating system, but that doesn't make the kernel nonfree any more than some distros shipping Steam by default makes the kernel nonfree. (Personally I like that our distro of choice doesn't ship Steam preinstalled, but I like having nonfree wifi firmware on the install disc because it's really hard to get wifi drivers when you don't have working wifi.)
-- Frost
For example, Debian and Fedora don’t ship with proprietary drivers. The user is still able to install those later, making the OS partially closed source.
Some distros, like Bazzite, give you the proprietary drivers during installation, which makes those partially closed source out of the box.