From the gist of it I get the distinct impression he's suffering from a bad case of the Dunning-Kruger effect. But seriously his facial hair is so irritating I literally can't watch the cunt without wanting to smash the screen. Sorry.

Thank you for the extended reply. I always enjoy reading your posts.

For the record I do agree that the GPL is superior to the BSD-style licenses but that really has nothing to do with blobs. Their code is still open even if you don't like the terms of redistribution.

I'll leave the licensing argument itself to blackhole (if they can be bothered). I'm not very good with that sort of thing.

It's not grey at all. The FAQ and installation guides make clear what will happen. And if the user is so against non-free firmware why do they have hardware for which it is a requirement?

Any hardware that doesn't load firmware blobs from the operating system has them implanted at the factory instead so it's not like blobs can be avoided with modern components like hard drive & motherboard controllers.

Never!

From the FAQ:

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#WifiOnly

EDIT: and please sed 's/SystemD/systemd/' in your signature. TIA.

Firmware != driver.

Did you install the relevant Realtek non-free firmware package as well?

Is there a transcript? I'm very impatient and I can read faster than I can listen.

If you have seatd installed and running then consolekit should not be needed. For seatd the user needs to be in the audio, video & seat groups. Or at least in Alpine that's the case. Have you asked about this on the antiX forums? The community there will probably have a better grasp of the situation.

I followed this guide but it would have to be adapted. This is under sway, I can't remember what antiX uses. Is it fluxbox or something similar?

EDIT: and do you really need pipewire? I find that everything on my system works without a sound server. IIRC it's only remote conferencing that needs one.

An unreferenced quote talking about "firmware images" in a vague and general sense doesn't really seem to support a claim that the OpenBSD kernel contains blobs.

Perhaps try OpenBSD yourself? The system is installed in a pristine, blob-free state but on first boot the hardware is checked and any firmware that is needed is downloaded and installed. It is an automatic process but it only works if the machine has an internet connection. OpenBSD is pragmatic about non-free firmware because if the user didn't want blobs then why do they have hardware that requires it?

So the fact remains that the OpenBSD kernel does not contain blobs and nor does an installed system. The only time blobs are added is if required and if the machine is connected to the internet.

Debian will include non-free firmware in the official bookworm release, which is not something that will ever happen with OpenBSD (IMO).

Those packages are no more. The last versions were for Debian oldstable.

Have you tried seatd with pipewire? That works for my Alpine system.

After what, exactly? What did you change?

You can use a static IP address instead, that doesn't require a running dhcp daemon or DHCP router support. Just make sure you don't pick an address that's already in use.

My system works with efivarfs as fs_spec under sysvinit, runit & openrc. It's using the daedalus kernel also. How bizarre.

Perhaps your machines are haunted

Devuan's stable-backports repository has >6, have you tried that? Newer is probably better for that card, upstream is on v6.0.10 at the moment.

There are also some driver parameters that can be tweaked to aid performance:

# tee /etc/modprobe.d/rtw8821ce.conf >/dev/null <<!
options rtw88_pci disable_aspm=y
options rtw88_core disable_lps=y
!
# update-initramfs -u -k all
# reboot

^ The tee command creates a file at /etc/modprobe.d/rtw8821ce.conf that disables ASPM & Deep PowerSaving, which might help maintain the connection. Delete the file & run update-initramfs -u -k all again if it doesn't help.