Debian guy could have just downloaded the nonfree installer that includes some common wifi and other hardware firmwares. There are some pragmatists at Debian.
Well... Say that to my live USB I tried booting off of a machine with a very modern nVidia card. I had to create a new boot entry to disable nouveau and install nVidia proprietary graphics into a persistent partition.
I understand nVidia is shit, and doesn't play nice with others. But my point is - it's not always that easy. (I thought it would be! I lost many hours, and pulled out lots of hair!)
Not in the good old days. Back in 2000something I built a custom installer image with a backported kernel from testing and some firmware to get debian installed on a new laptop.
Agree but Debian is still damn manual compared to many Fedora quality of life improvements.
Meanwhile, removing snaps and replacing with flatpaks on a set up ubuntu system is crazy! All those loop mounts suddenly start showing up when snapd is gone