alt Hacker NewsDebian surely doesn't depend on Lenovo or Asus to release OS updates for my laptop. Apparently it's not "everyone else" that needs this but it's some sort of dependency for mobile (qualcomm?) devices
I have trouble understanding why this is different on mobile devices. People keep speaking of blobs but that doesn't seem to be a thing in laptop/desktop hardware, unless they mean something like the firmware running on your wifi card and uefi chip? But those can be interfaced with from any kernel version, afaik, so I don't get it
Debian does not write the whole software stack running everywhere on your system. So if you want your system to be "supported", as in, "if a security flaw is discovered in a firmware, I want it patched and I want my firmware to be updated", then you need whoever writes that firmware to do it.
That's a dependency: if you want your system to be secure, you depend on the software running on your system to be patched when a security flaw is published.