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Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

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Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#31

Post by toolz »

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…

Have you tried putting linux on a zenbook? Easily as good or better than mac hardware and I've put archlinux on there with zero issues on multiple models.

Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#32

Post by rtpg »

toolz wrote: post #31
rtpg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you tried putting linux on a zenbook? Easily as good or better than mac hardware and I've put archlinux on there with zero issues on multiple models.

how's the battery life? Being able to go long periods without a charger is really important to me.

I have a friend who has a zenbook, was pretty unimpressed by the build quality, but that might have been a lower end model.

Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#33

Post by rtpg »

chucksmash wrote: post #28
rtpg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I've had some Dell and HP laptops (and a super old thinkpad, but that one worked alright given it couldn't really do much), and have had extremely bad driver issues. The big one has been the graphics card, but also flaky wifi, and even sound card issues! Battery life was always an issue (I would have 4 hours on windows, only an hour and change on linux), but I think that was linked to graphics card issues.

Having issues with a sound card gives me flashback to windows 95.

Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#35

Post by TheCowboy »

bla2 wrote: post #26
enupten wrote: post #23

I wish it was more Thinkpad-y rather than Macbook-y; especially since Lenovo -I've heard- is well on its way to ruining the former.

The newest Carbon X1 looks pretty good, at least compared to the previous model.

It would be nice if Lenovo provided the option of the classic Thinkpad keyboard. I'm considering going with a used Thinkpad as my next laptop for that reason.

Laptop choice seems to have become a monoculture of Apple clones. If Purism would provide that keyboard option I would find it hard to resist.

Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#36

Post by pconner »

w1ntermute wrote: post #18
netvarun wrote: post #15

The 10^6$ question is whether Richard Stallman[1] would use this? [1] http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/

That's a bit outdated - Stallman's now using a ThinkPad X60: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html OT, but an amusing line from that page: > I never pay for anything on the Web. Anything on the net that requires payment, I don't do. Or more succintly: > Out, out, damned Spotify! Flick off, Netflix!

It would be pretty hard to run netflix in emacs anyway

Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#37

Post by superuser2 »

A truly philosophically pure laptop would, among other things, guarantee absolutely no involvement of slave labor/abusive practices in its supply chain. Everyone from the mines to the assembly plant to the retail store would have secure, middle-class employment. Revenue would not fund political corruption or violence related to labor, natural resources, or environmental impact.

But it would not contain binary blobs either, so this is a positive step. The branding is a little grandiose for the extent of its "philosophical purity," though.

Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#38

Post by TD-Linux »

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.

The Novena is pretty good in that its schematics are entirely open source. It also has plenty of expansion headers, a FPGA, removable RAM and wifi cards. However, I don't think modularity is as important, because it's hard to make something modular, performant, AND low cost. If you have the sources, you can always make a customized version to suit your exact needs yourself, without the need for it to be modular.

(typing this from my Novena)

Re: Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

#40

Post by yueri »

joezydeco wrote: post #29
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?

From the website: "There are also hardware components, like the HD or SSD, that are flashable, and therefore upgradeable, but that currently run firmware that is not yet freed. We are working to get freed versions of this firmware! Being the first manufacturer to care about freedom and privacy, we are making a lot of progress upstream."
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