
The first 15″ laptop designed to protect your digital life - fsflover
https://puri.sm/products/librem-15/
======
rshnotsecure
I bought a Purism laptop last year for around $3,000 USD. It is ok.

Purism had a bizarre falling out with their former CTO. I am inclined to
believe the CTO [1].

The documentation is basically non-existent. There is no end to end hardware
tear down, at least a fully complete one, which I found kind of shocking. The
special privacy first operating system is a very lightly modified Ubuntu OS.
System76's popOS, almost a clone itself of Ubuntu, is probably more
customized.

The manufacturing seemed shoddy, although not terrible. Just a lot of air-
space when opening the thing and pieces jiggle around a little too much.

The USB keys they send you are awesome (micro usb, usb c, and usb A in the
same key!) and I wish more vendors did the PGP smart card setup they do.

In general the German open source movement has grown...strange...the last two
years. Recently I was shown that one of the main contributors to the a small
but important part of the Linux library that handles multimode to Usb
devices...runs an overpopulation Institute that reminds me of the bad guy from
the James Bond movie Moonraker [2]. They also added a "HuaweiAltModeGlobal"
which causes no end of trouble for anyone in the networking field who commonly
uses say tcpdump and USB router sticks.

[1] -
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-T...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-
Todoric-Interview)

[2] -
[https://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/](https://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/)

~~~
vinay427
> They also added a "HuaweiAltModeGlobal" which causes no end of trouble for
> anyone in the networking field who commonly uses say tcpdump and USB router
> sticks.

I'm not familiar with this. Could you explain what this means? I couldn't find
anything on it besides a Reddit post which wasn't very elucidating.

------
duskwuff
I respect what Purism are doing, but I really wish they wouldn't resort to
this sort of hyperbole to sell their computers:

> All other laptops use hardware chips coupled with software that can betray
> you. News stories have shown how these chips can surreptitiously transmit
> voice, networking, picture or video signals. Other chips are used to install
> spyware, malware or viruses.

This advertising copy implies, without basis, that other computers are
deliberately designed to be insecure and contain hardware that is intended to
"install spyware, malware or viruses", and that their computer is completely
free of any firmware vulnerabilities (or, by another reading, contains no
firmware at all).

I don't think that either of these claims stands up to any real scrutiny. At
best, it's a wild exaggeration of the facts that 1) computers have network
hardware which can be used to transmit information, including audio and video
recordings, under the command of software; 2) driver and firmware
vulnerabilities exist; 3) there have been a small number of incidents where
computers have shipped with a BIOS that triggered a Windows feature to
automatically install software from the BIOS.

None of these are problems which Purism can claim to have _solved_ with their
computer design. Hardware "kill switches" are at best a clumsy workaround --
isolating a computer from the network severely limits its utility -- and using
open-source firmware is not a guarantee of safety.

Besides, if they're so proud of their hardware choices, surely they should be
willing to go into some more detail about the hardware they decided on, and
the reasons they made those choices?

~~~
fsflover
>> I don't think that either of these claims stands up to any real scrutiny.

I think they mean in particular the Intel ME. It all probably is more true
than false. See

[https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel](https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel)

[https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/](https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/)

------
noodlesUK
Whilst I’m really happy purism is doing what they’re doing, it’s always a
little sad to see the handful of things that get in the way of this being a
fantastic machine. Firstly, the WiFi card being 802.11n really doesn’t cut it
in 2020. Next, the bezels look really large. I’ve fallen in love with my
precision 5530’s tiny bezels. I really want a machine with some good I/O, made
sturdily, with an AMD cpu/GPU, and free software. I don’t think such a thing
really exists though.

~~~
pengaru
> with an AMD cpu/GPU, and free software

Last I checked the AMD story was worse than Intel. At least on Intel you can
go the ME-cleaner route to disable the Management Engine backdoor. On AMD
there's no equivalent for the PSP AFAIK.

AIUI Purism ships Intel laptops with both ME disabled and Coreboot.

------
errantspark
Damn, they want $1500 for a Core i7 7500U? You can get a laptop with a Ryzen
4800 HS for the same price. It's not particularly clear to me what you're
getting versus a $600 computer with equivalent specs running Tails or
something.

~~~
dylz
My assumption is this is related to the ability to neuter Intel Management
Engine.

------
hedora
I’m happy they finally moved to 4K. Now, if they’d just center the keyboard
and trackpad under the screen (by getting rid of the number pad), I’d be
sorely tempted to buy one.

------
dirtnugget
I don't understand the need for a "Purism Key" (AKA Search button). Any device
I had them on I never used it. Rather do something like Spotlight/Alfred/Wox,
where you can customise the hotkey.

~~~
lub
The picture suggests this is Super_L, a key most people use all the time.
Typically you use it to open some global menu or shortcuts related to your
window manager.

Windows devices normally have a Windows logo printed on that key. Purism just
decided to print their logo instead.

------
ccvannorman
I'm on the market for a $2k 15" laptop, and would buy this one in a heartbeat
-- it has looks, performance, quality -- if it had a NVidia 2070 GPU. As it
is, it's fairly useless to me.

I do like the hardware switches. Nothing says "You're in control" like being
able to interrupt the electricity with a physical toggle.

~~~
pkulak
Having NVidia anywhere near my Linux machine is the deal-breaker for me.

------
parliament32
Glad to see the prices are getting somewhat more reasonable. Configured it the
same way as my XPS and the price is pretty close (apart from the processor
being a generation behind, but if you're doing CPU-intensive tasks on a laptop
you're doing it wrong anyway).

------
0-O-0
I wouldn't trust Purism with my money after Librem 5 disaster.

~~~
m463
I would say that our current situation with "choose ios or android" is a more
meaningful problem.

~~~
0-O-0
I would love to see someone solving this problem, but I think that it will
take a company with a significantly better track with transparency to do that.

BTW, Pinephone is a (significantly cheaper) option.

