No way to select "Free software only" installation

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement]

Groovy Desktop 20201013.1

With GRUB used to boot the ISO the option to select "Free software only" is gone (with other options like acpi or keyboard layouts)

could these options be readded somewhere?

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1899613

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

This is also fallout from the isolinux->grub migration. Was this an understood/agreed change?

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

You reported this as passing with the Beta on October 1st so I guess we should be looking for something that changed since then.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

I just re-verified with Beta and the option is not available. The test has been mistakenly marked as pass.

I don't recall any discussion with the Desktop team to remove this option.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

Nah, it was broken at beta time too. AFAIK the isolinux -> grub change happened before that, so that makes sense.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

Free-only option used to specify apt-setup/restricted=false apt-setup/multiverse=false to not install packages from there; nor to enable those software repositories.

Today, no packages are installed from multiverse or restricted by default. If one ticks the box for 3rd-party-drivers such as nvidia; smart-link; broadcom may get installed.

So without ticking 3rd-party box, to get equivalent of free software only, one has to go into "software sources" and untick multiverse & restricted there.

Providing this boot menu entry, for every variant of the boot option, is not a good UX. Imho 3rd party drivers tickbox is enough to satisfy this use case.

Please note that intel & amd64 microcode are in main, and are always installed, as without them the systems would be vulnerable to CPU attacks.