Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 145 posts

Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#21

Post by walterbell »

rl3 wrote: post #10
pingswept wrote: post #6

This appears to be similar to the open source hardware Novena laptop ( https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop ), but closed source hardware. From the Purism crowdfunding campaign: "The Librem 15 is the first high-end laptop where you are in control and have complete visibility into the kernel, the operating system, and all software." It seems like the Novena came first and is substantially more free/op…

It would be amazing if Novena or other projects like it evolved into something resembling Google's Project Ara, but for laptops instead of phones. Laptops have unfortunately never really achieved the modularity and ease of modification that PCs have. They are seemingly perpetual slaves to cost, form factor and all the concerns that follow.

Panasonic rugged devices are modular, so it's technically feasible, even if the economics are not there yet.

ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/panasonic/business/toughpad/downloads/Panasonic-Toughpad-FZ-M1-Configurations.pdf

Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#25

Post by nitrogen »

pherocity_ wrote: post #16
stephen-mw wrote: post #9

I'm excited about a company that will ensure a good, compatible experience with linux on a laptop. I develop on mac osx and linux vms (vagrant). I want to move to linux but the linux desktop experience just isn't there yet.

I don't think it ever will be. I first installed redhat linux back in 95, and it was a multi weekend project, and I had to solder something. Since then, the installation has gone from insane to Windows XP easy, but it seems stuck there. And even for a media server, I have to dip into the shell to get it working. If you still have to use the shell 20 years later for a non edge case, it isn't going to get better, there…

You can get font smoothing from xterm by using the -fa option. Use xfontsel to build the parameter string. There are probably "xresource" (iirc) settings to change its color palette, or you can use a 256color scheme for your editor. It's not exactly easy, but it is very fast and lightweight.

Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#28

Post by chucksmash »

rtpg wrote: post #17
javert wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the linux desktop experience is there. So I guess it depends on what you want. There's nothing I want to do I can't do on Linux as well or better, except play games, and that's not enough of a factor for me to not prefer Linux.

From my testing, the macbook air is one of the better laptops on the market now in terms of battery life and general feel (the touchpad is second to none in my opinion). But even for a laptop this prevalent, getting it to work with Ubuntu is a pain, and you run into a bunch of little bugs consistently. I understand that it's a major uphill battle, but over the many many laptops I've tried to use with Linux, I've not…

I've been happily plugging away with Ubuntu on a Thinkpad T530 for a while now and an old Dell w/ an Intel Core 2 Duo for years before that. Both installs went smoothly.

The hassle involved in getting Ubuntu working on a MacBook is not representative of laptop installations in general. Macs are special beasts and looking at the relevant support wiki page there are all sorts of hoops that I just didn't have to jump through in either of my non-Mac installations. I'm sorry you had a poor experience!

Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#29

Post by joezydeco »

delinka wrote: post #3

"...uncontrolled by outside forces..." Who validates the silicon and how is this accomplished? We've known for quite some time about the potential for rogue circuits hiding amongst the millions of transistors.

Especially that 500GB HDD. What open-source firmware is loaded onto that?

Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#30

Post by yzzxy »

dmm wrote: post #19
yzzxy wrote: post #4

On a similar note, I've recently become very interested in buying a Lemote laptop. It's exactly the tiny form factor I'm looking, runs an open MIPS chip, and comes preinstalled with some version of Linux, though I'd probably load Gentoo as it's said to work quite well. The various models run $150-300 in USD depending on the supplier, from what I can tell. Unfortunately it's very hard to buy these computers in the US,…

The Lemote Yeelong is very slow, comparable to the 1.6GHz atom netbooks of 2008. You'd be better off with a thinkpad x60 with libreboot installed.

It's the novelty I'm interested in. It will be 99% used as mobile keyboard feeding into vi.
Post reply on HN