Long story short - Debian was tried. Wifi didn't work. Armbian Bullseye was tried. WiFi worked. All was good, more or less, aside from guilt from sin of using non-free hardware... But then, Distrowatch discussion of Raspberry PiOS rolling out "an update to the distribution which installs a third-party repository for Microsoft's VSCode packages" was observed coincident with Armbian updates querying a new, non-Debian, site. Paranoia or conscience motivated a return to Debian, Bullseye.
Install, convoluted as it was, worked OK. Contrib and non-free were added to /etc/apt/sources.list, despite the shame. firmware-realtek was installed to get RTL8723BS firmware. Still no Wifi. Firmware is found: # find ./ -type f -iname rtl8723bs* ./usr/lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8723bs_wowlan.bin ./usr/lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8723bs_nic.bin ./usr/lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8723bs_bt.bin Modprobe is attempted, but module is not found. # modprobe rtl8723bs_wowlan.bin modprobe: FATAL: Module rtl8723bs_wowlan.bin not found in directory /lib/modules/5.10.0-3-arm64 File is copied, but module is still not found. # cp -p ./usr/lib/firmware/rtlwifi/rtl8723bs_wowlan.bin /lib/modules/5.10.0-3-arm64/ # modprobe rtl8723bs_wowlan.bin modprobe: FATAL: Module rtl8723bs_wowlan.bin not found in directory /lib/modules/5.10.0-3-arm64 Help? What magic step(s) are being missed? Thanks! Some References: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/PINE64/PINEA64 https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20210208#news https://forum.armbian.com/topic/15594-armbian-loves-microsoft/ https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PINE_A64#Datasheets_for_Components_and_Peripherals