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Review of the Purism Librem 13

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Re: Review of the Purism Librem 13

#11

Post by oftenwrong »

I own one of these as my personal laptop. I pretty much agree with this review. Unless you care about more niche things like coreboot, there is nothing really special about the laptop. There is nothing really bad about it, either. It meets my practical needs, and I am happy to support the limited market of more-"free" hardware.

I have not tried to use PureOS. As soon as I received it, I tried to install Qubes OS, but I was not successful. I ended up installing Debian stable, which has been my OS of choice for many years. I have not had any hardware support issues so far on Debian.

Re: Review of the Purism Librem 13

#12

Post by stamps »

I'm currently running a Librem 13 as well. I came from my modded x230 (FHD display mod, coreboot, upgraded speakers).

Mostly it's been a great experience. Like the author I also miss the trackpoint.

Between the author and I, I think we cover most of the mainline OSes you'd see on these machines (debian and arch). I'm running Manjaro (xfce) with no issues.

In total though the Librem 13 was about $300 more expensive then other similar laptops.

I believe there's a lot value in that extra cost. The privacy and open source efforts mainly. We have to support these efforts more and more if we want to protect ourselves from the larger companies that continue to mine our data.

Re: Review of the Purism Librem 13

#13

Post by stamps »

oftenwrong wrote: post #11

I own one of these as my personal laptop. I pretty much agree with this review. Unless you care about more niche things like coreboot, there is nothing really special about the laptop. There is nothing really bad about it, either. It meets my practical needs, and I am happy to support the limited market of more-"free" hardware. I have not tried to use PureOS. As soon as I received it, I tried to install Qubes OS, but…

What had you hung up on Qubes?

I used it for some time on my librem and it worked well, but I generally needed better Windows in a VM support for work.

Re: Review of the Purism Librem 13

#14

Post by stamps »

noir_lord wrote: post #9
c22 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was able to order my ThinkPad without a camera or a microphone and I saved $35.

I left mine in because it it only knocked a few quid off and very occasionally I might need them. Both disabled in the BIOS and I taped over the camera though.

Camera taped over obviously it's unusable.

Do you trust a Lenovo BIOS to truly disable the microphone?

Re: Review of the Purism Librem 13

#15

Post by e1ven »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #2

I remember how much praise the Purism laptops got for the hardware kill switches on the microphone/camera. It seems like it would be easier for the 90% of the target audience, who probably never uses the mic or the camera anyway , to just remove those pieces from the hardware altogether and let those who need it plug in a USB mic or webcam.

I personally love that feature!

I work remotely, and we do regular scheduled video meetings. I don't want to carry around a dongle, but I also want to know that it's fully off when I'm not in a chat.

This way I don't need to trust it's off - I know hackers, malware, etc can't turn it on.

I have tape over my Macbook camera now, and I use Micro Snitch for the Audio, but I'd love a hardware solution.

Re: Review of the Purism Librem 13

#16

Post by deltron3030 »

oftenwrong wrote: post #11

I own one of these as my personal laptop. I pretty much agree with this review. Unless you care about more niche things like coreboot, there is nothing really special about the laptop. There is nothing really bad about it, either. It meets my practical needs, and I am happy to support the limited market of more-"free" hardware. I have not tried to use PureOS. As soon as I received it, I tried to install Qubes OS, but…

Would the touchpad be usable for precise design work (e.g. working with pen tools/bezier curves in vector programs)?

Re: Review of the Purism Librem 13

#18

Post by api »

As usual the touch pad is a major weakness of not only this but almost all non-Apple laptops. Apple seems to have some kind of soft monopoly on really great touch pads.

Re: Review of the Purism Librem 13

#19

Post by mattl »

I bought one a few weeks ago and I'm now in the process of returning it.

- First, I don’t mean any slight on Purism. At all. This is meant as an honest review.

Physically the Librem 13v3 is a bit bigger than a 13 inch MacBook Air. A little thicker but nothing significant. It does need two hands to open it though.

The trackpad, while good is unreliable. I found myself frequently trying to select text in a terminal and the cursor would not move with the trackpad held down by my thumb.

The keyboard. Firstly the key that does both | and \ is mapped incorrectly in hardware. This requires a systemd patch in PureOS. Also I frequently found keys didn’t register when I was typing.

The operating system. PureOS is basically Debian GNU/Linux. It seems mostly decent and obviously helps Purism ship patches for things like the keyboard. But it’s also buggy. I would frequently boot into a GNOME session with no UI elements. A lot of things like the functionality to suggest programs that aren’t installed never worked, there’s no working Bluetooth on the machine, as far as I can tell the headphone jack doesn’t accept a 3.5mm headset.

The load on the machine at basically idle was high. If I had more than a browser with a couple tabs open it was over 2.00 constantly. The WiFi and camera switches are neat but the indicator lights didn’t match the switch status. The whole experience generally felt worse than the experience I had with my previous ThinkPad (T400s) and that had the worst trackpad I’ve ever dealt with.

I’m going to try another Dell XPS.

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