Is there a FOSS only repo like Debain's main? I couldn't see anywhere in The official repos if core allows non-free repos.
comradegodzilla 1 point 9 months ago
Debian is great and so is arch. Parabola is still updated. I’ll try it if you care about pure FOSS. Debian has non open source drivers in installation (i think). Happened after bookworm. The GNU website has distro a that are purely FOSS.
bitfucker 1 point 9 months ago
Well, because Arch tries to be simple and pragmatic. The way the official repo is organized speaks volumes about its philosophy. Just read their FAQs
My bad, not FAQs, but their explanation page
E_coli42 1 point 9 months ago
I didn't see anything in that wiki that suggests why a simple check when installing a piece of software on whether it's license conflicts with a license you don't want to install isn't simple and pragmatic. Other distros like Gentoo do this.
bitfucker 1 point 9 months ago
Because it adds something that is not essential, so it is not "simple". If package A depends on package B with an incompatible license then it needs to provide a means to specify alternate packages. Arch follows upstream with best effort possible, so changing dependency could be seen as breaking that. However, pacman already supports choosing alternate packages during installation so technically they could add it, but how many percentage of users are needing that convenience? Not to mention the arch team will need to maintain said list of alternatives for every dependencies. If you want, you can add it yourself via pacman hook to prevent you from accidentally installing non free software, or write a wrapper for pacman, or use other distro like Parabola.
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You might be interested in Parabola, an Arch-based FOSS-only distribution. If you don't want to switch to a whole new distribution, maybe you can use its repos from Arch (not that I've heard of anyone trying that).
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