Hey there folks,
TL;DR, Congratulations on Bookworm, and thank you so much!
It's been many years since I ran pure Debian and not some derivative, but recently for uninteresting and varied reasons, perhaps even whimsy, I decided to see how the upstream project was doing.
On Friday 9th of June 2023 I decided to go ahead and download the latest stable, and lo and behold I saw that I was one day away from the new release. When I read that non-free was integrated into the installation experience I could not be happier to know that install would likely be a walk in the park.
Yesterday I waited with excitement for the images to become available and wasted no time installing.
I'm delighted to report that my install went absolutely cleanly and as far as I can tell so far all of the hardware on my PC is working without any configuration effort on my part.
Amazing. :-)
Perhaps this email should have gone to debian-user, but really the essence of my message is one of congratulations to the entire project team of Debian for making what I believe to be a seismic shift of a release. My sentiments felt appropriate here. Apologies if this was the wrong choice.
You folks absolutely crushed it. Thank you, so very much.
I'm going to poke around and see where I can contribute going forward. It's been literally decades since I made any contributions to Debian, I look forward to being active. It's good to be back.
Best,
David Peacock