[bug#58357] [Patch staging ] doc add a recommended system in 'Hardware Considerations'

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

This discussion and others we had at the Ten Years of Guix event makes
me think we should strive to avoid bad surprises by being more
explicit.  Concretely, we could:

  • Under “Hardware Considerations”, list common devices known not to
    work without non-free {firm,soft}ware, such as Intel Wifi (iwlwifi).
    We cannot be exhaustive but we should at least mention common
    problems with recent x86_64 laptops.

  • Under “Hardware Considerations”, make the list of devices known to
    work clearer, in tabular form, perhaps expanding it.

  • In the installer, print a message upfront when unusable devices are
    found—typically Intel wifi.

    I’m not sure how to do this though.  Maintaining a list of known-bad
    devices doesn’t sound great, but it’s better than nothing.
    Instrumenting the firmware-loading mechanism would be a good way to
    detect problems, but I think it’s not even getting invoked in
    Linux-libre (or not always).  Alternatively, we could tweak
    deblobbing so that it produces a list of known-bad modules or
    devices.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.