
Review of the Purism Librem 13 - ingve
https://botondballo.wordpress.com/2018/07/03/review-of-the-purism-librem-13/
======
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.

~~~
deltron3030
Would the touchpad be usable for precise design work (e.g. working with pen
tools/bezier curves in vector programs)?

~~~
stamps
This review talks about using a Wacom tablet with it:
[https://www.davidrevoy.com/article341/review-purism-
librem13...](https://www.davidrevoy.com/article341/review-purism-
librem13-laptop)

I find the touch pad to be accurate and usable on Manjaro, but I only use it
to move around the terminal, IDE, and VMs.

------
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.

~~~
stamps
I'm curious if most of your issues were related to Pure OS. And if that's the
case.. why ship with it installed?

Overall I'm not a fan of these additional spins of linux. System76 does this
too with PopOS.

Our experiences are nearly polar opposite and the only difference I can detect
is the OS.

I can say that the bluetooth works as expected (currently using a mouse).
There is a bit of configuration that had to be done to get a Plantronics
headset to work with LinPhone for my VoIP line, but that really isn't
something I'd expect to work seamlessly in my environment.

For the headphone jack mine clearly works as expected. Though I haven't tried
Apple's earbuds which may be a more common test item. I'm using Shure earbuds
and the connections are flipped.

That load is high. I'm averaging 0.71. Maybe you're doing something more
intense than I am, but generally I have a Windows VM (MS Office open) and
Firefox/Slack/WebStorm running.

~~~
mattl
I tried booting Ubuntu on it, similar problems.

What model do you have?

~~~
stamps
Librem 13v3.

I bought the base model then bought upgrades separate - 16GB of RAM, 1TB NVMe,
and 2TB SSD.

I suppose it's possible you got a lemon, but unfortunate as these things
should be tested intently.

------
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.

~~~
frio
I've got a very similar setup, except with a T430s rather than an X230 (and no
new speakers, even though that's probably the thing I hate the most).

I'm probably not ready to replace it yet; it ends up being a terminal more
than anything else and the performance is fine for where it's at. But... every
now and then when I'm browsing, it'll slow to a crawl, and I pine for the
fjords/something newer.

I've been holding back partly because it's still difficult to get more than
16GiB of RAM easily, but: is the Skylake-based Purism 13 a large or
incremental step up in performance?

~~~
stamps
It's difficult to quantify, but I'd say the only thing I notice is battery
life. On the x230, before the mods I've made to modernize it a bit more, the
battery life was somewhere south of 4 hours.

With the Librem 13 I do get 6-10 hours depending on work load.

~~~
frio
Cheers for that; I'll stick with what I've got for a while longer then :) (but
I'll admit the battery life is killing me currently).

------
AdmiralAsshat
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.

~~~
c22
I was able to order my ThinkPad without a camera or a microphone and I saved
$35.

~~~
noir_lord
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.

~~~
stamps
Camera taped over obviously it's unusable.

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

~~~
noir_lord
As much as I trust an American chip, a Japanese SSD or Korean RAM.

At a certain point you just have to trade one thing for another, frankly my
phone worries me more.

------
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.

~~~
mattl
My experience of it was such that it was actually basically defective.

------
theyinwhy
Why do people regard the fn position as right or wrong? Especially if you come
from Apple clearly lenovo does it "right". Isn't it all about flavor?

Although.. Can't we all agree putting fn right to space would be right?

~~~
abrowne
They want the control key in the bottom left.

My preference is control next to space, like command is for Macs. Luckily this
remapping is easy with XKB settings.

------
auslander
Still have to include closed firmware blobs, Intel Firmware Support Package
(FSP) or AMD AGESA firmware.

[https://libreboot.org/faq.html#what-systems-are-
compatible-w...](https://libreboot.org/faq.html#what-systems-are-compatible-
with-libreboot)

Pretty much the only option today with open source firmware is Marvell's ARM.
And they recently bought Cavium with their ThunderX2 server grade CPU. Hope
soon we'll have it.

------
binaryanomaly
I have a librem 13v2, too.

While I like it from an idealistic point of view - in terms of hardware build
quality the current generation does just not get anywhere near a macbook pro.
Maybe the next generation can close this gap further. As long as it is that
big it cannot become my main device.

~~~
DiddleBit
Hey, if you are not using your Librem 13v2 then I'll happily take it off your
hands.

Help my third-world a$s that can't afford anything more than my current 2009
Dell with broken hinges.

Thank you!

~~~
binaryanomaly
I am using it as 2nd device when doing linux stuff. I would have preferred to
be able to use it as the one and only main device.

------
Y_Y
$1,399.00 for the basic spec

~~~
stamps
Price of effort to freedom.

------
stock_toaster
Anyone run OpenBSD on one of these?

