alt Hacker NewsNowadays the non-free-firmware repo is active by default, so the normal official debian image actually works.
It used to be the case that the normal download from the homepage was often useless because it didn't support most networking hardware, but this is no longer the case now.
How long ago was that? I tried Debian about 15-20 years ago and I don’t recall encountering that issue.
(The issue I do remember encountering was random kernel panics that I didn’t have with Ubuntu on the same machine.)