Distro developers began discussing ways to reduce the size of firmware updates last year. Now, in Ubuntu 26.04, it’s introducing meta-packaging to spread Linux firmware across 17 smaller packages in the
resolutearchives. This resolves a bug filed in 2022.The sub-packages are:
- linux-firmware-mellanox-spectrum
- linux-firmware-intel-wireless
- linux-firmware-intel-graphics
- linux-firmware-amd-graphics
- linux-firmware-nvidia-graphics
- linux-firmware-intel-misc
- linux-firmware-broadcom-wireless
- linux-firmware-netronome
- linux-firmware-misc
- linux-firmware-qlogic
- linux-firmware-marvell-wireless
- linux-firmware-mediatek
- linux-firmware-marvell-prestera
- linux-firmware-realtek
- linux-firmware-qualcomm-wireless
- linux-firmware-qualcomm-graphics
- linux-firmware-qualcomm-misc
Per the contents of my /usr/portage/distfiles, the original undivided package is ~500MB, making it the largest single package I’ve got on my system. Splitting it seems like a very good idea . . . but Gentoo generally prefers not to alter upstream tarballs, so I’m likely stuck.
What the hell is this? Ubuntu can’t just go around making decisions I actually agree with!
Cynically, isn’t this just because Debian did it with Trixie, so now Ubuntu’s next version is pulling in the change?
They do it all the time, but then ‘balance’ it with something terrible. (these aren’t in chronological order)
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Upstart - good idea.
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PulseAudio wayyyy too early - bad idea.
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Unity - good idea
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Mir (display server) - bad idea
- Snap - bad idea
Snap - fuck you
I wanted to create a caching snap proxy and it turns out you have to register it with canonical to get a cert.
I’d thoroughly erased it’s existence from my mind it seems. It’s the reason I went back upstream to Debian many moons ago.
It’s existence alone didn’t bother me, but the day I went to install something with APT and it force installed the Snap was the last day I ever used Ubuntu.
Mint doesn’t use snap, officially doesn’t support it (though it can be enabled and used).
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I like this, because I’m on a slow line here in Greece, and pretty much every time there’s an update, the linux-firmware package is 600 MB, which is massive to download.
Isn’t this always the case in fedora? I remember seeing a lot of linux-firmware-* packages when updating and i guess i’ve seen it in other distros as well
OpenSUSE too
Arch does the same thing. It allows you to only install the firmware packages you need on your system.
It’s a good idea but I just know for sure that I would manage to break the network driver of a remote machine with this.
