Yeah, after thinking about it - I suppose I don’t need changes as drastic as my OP stated. I really just want to see a quad-core processor and ethernet port in the Librem 15. At least give me that much if I’m gonna be dropping so much money in.
Yes, it’s absolutely true that even Windows users should want the ME removed if they’re not using it. I currently use Windows 10 LTSB that I heavily modify/secure using a set of tools (second DL from the top) and I feel that even Windows users should have an interest.
I would be interested in switching our corporate laptops over to Purism 13/14/15" for some positions. The market for 17" laptops seems to be limited, but doing a pre-order would probably be best to get actual interest.
It would also be of interest if you could get some of your Intel ME disabled machines into cloud providers.
Being able to deliver a laptop in three days globally also seems important. I have a pretty long term view on things, but I am not sure I want to run the risk of you not existing anymore by the time I get the laptop in my hands. I can’t imagine I am the only one thinking that.
From a business perspective I agree with shipping Windows as an option too. I don’t care about Windows, but there are simply way more Windows systems in existence and every executive would probably want to have one. That could drive economies of scale.
Meanwhile, thanks to those brave people who already bought Purism.
1- Three finger drag gesture.
2- A very good multitouch trackpad.
3- Keyboard with Spain layout.
4- 32GB RAM
5- I’d like to see the weight reduced (maybe a 14-incher would fit my needs better, as I want a display bigger than 13’’ but with a weight less than 1.8 Kg).
+1 on Ethernet and Quadcores. Dual-core is nice but will occasionally max out.
I also want hi-res graphics. Around 10 Megapixels, say, three 2560x1440 monitors or something like that. I don’t care that much about GPU power (i.e. game framerates) - I’m happy if it can render the desktop at that kind of resolution.
If they can’t do Quad-Core then at least upgrade to Coffee Lake but my understanding is that it’d be easier for them to stay in Skylake than it would be to switch architectures like that.
with a new chip come the probability that coreboot would be back at ground zero and all work to neuter the IME would start over. so yes it would most likley start at dround 0 i would not be shocked to hear that Purism has at least 1 refrance design woth a coffee lake processor to give this a go. for a good overview Brian Lunduke just had the system 76 gurys on talking about the fact that BIOS vendors have a large head start where firmware is concerned. the reference that is used for building embedded systems is not released by Intel for at least 6 month after a CPU comes out. what that means to us is the core boot team cant even look to see what changes might have been made for half the release cycle of a chip.
Downscaled the title of the thread because it was an eyesore on the forum.
Multicore ARM sounds amazing and I didn’t even know it exists.
I’m gonna read a bit more about ARM because I know little about it, all I know is pretty much everything is Intel or AMD and once in a while you’ll see ARM in something really tiny / not very powerful. I’ve been under the impression that ARM chips don’t really get powerful enough to run a full laptop or something.
Edit:
Sounds promising. Maybe look into this Purism?
I mean, if you toss Intel & AMD altogether, doesn’t that mean we rid ourselves of the evil ME? Or is there something in ARM chips that’ll also have to be tackled?
That being said… would everything just work fine on an ARM chip the way they would on an Intel or AMD chip? Something tells me there might be compatibility issues because the ARM chips have so little marketshare that they wouldn’t be considered by your average developer or something. Not sure if you could just slap Qubes on an ARM device or something.
Just saying it sounds appealing at first but I wouldn’t want it if 90% of programs can’t run on it or something. I see lots of installers that say “Intel64” or “AMD64” on them all the time and I never think twice about it because they just work, but I feel like that might start to become significant if done on an ARM machine.
Not sure though, that delves into computer science that I wouldn’t know since I’m just some guy that knows how to install junk and navigate GUIs which is pretty much what my jobs revolve around.
@Alex
ARM is a RISC based architecture with a less complex (reduced) instruction set (it‘s also in its name) compared to a x86 CPU. It hugely helps to reduce power consumption.
The majority of all mobile devices run on an ARM architecture and for a few years it is also available in 64bit. Also, afaik the librem5 phone is heading there.
I don‘t know what lobbyists are doing against it, I just have the impression they are trying to keep the ARM proc down, even if more or less all major chip vendors are also involved in the ARM standards.
Nevertheless, there are also big servers available with ARM architecture. It does make sense, because less power consumption which brings down heat production and this means less air condition is needed in data centers and this lowers the cost to run a data center.
But, it is in deed a different architecture. Many Linux distributions also offer an ARM64 port, so most applications are available in a Linux world. If you are using Windows emulations in Wine you should expect a performance drop. If you are using 3rd party applications that are closed source, there might be no port of that binary blob, but, I would wonder anyway why somebody looking for privacy oriented hardware like the Librem is then using binary blob software.
But of course, there might be reasons and a different architecture might narrow the possibilities for someone living in an x86 world.
It was just a thought and it was not that long ago, when all my macs were power pcs, so maybe I‘m not afraid of changing archs.
I use my laptop a bit everywhere, so one of my main concern is the screen quality. I don’t know how it is right now, I didn’t find any thorough review on that, apart from one that said that the view angle was rather narrow, which does not sound good to me. Ultimately, screen quality could be what makes me buy, or not, a Librem 15.
There are some binary-blob software I use - production software and the sorts.
But being real about that, there’s loads of software I’ll still need that are Windows-only and thus it just means I’ll have to have a second computer on the side for things like gaming and production software. Those kinds of things just don’t really have a lot of Linux support.
In the end it’s undeniable that having ONLY a Purism system wouldn’t be viable. Have way too much stuff that Windows and Intel64/AMD64 is required for, or even if they do exist for Linux they’re not open-source and I wouldn’t want to introduce them to my Purism system because that goes against the entire point of having bought the Purism system to begin with. The reality is that relatively few things would work on Qubes + ARM64 and are open-source.
Heck even if I left gaming and making videos / music (which I never intend to do), I’d still need Windows just to sync music to my phone.
I would intend for the Purism system to just be for browsing and communication and such, and I figure ARM would be fine for that. When talking about Purism with friends I usually tell them they’d want to have another computer available to them as well, I wouldn’t suggest it to be your only computer.
That being said, long as you have another system to put all your toys on, Purism is a good system to have and I think that as long as most Linux distros and Linux software work on it, it should be fine. Then we wouldn’t have to talk about the Intel ME or anything anymore either.
I think ARM would be a pretty good cure-all for the issue of Intel ME and so forth. Then the crew at Purism won’t have to piss with it anymore and they’ll be able to focus on what’s next. Besides, a chip that comes without any of the nonsense to begin with, without any of foundation necessary for it to exist on, is surely better and safer than one you’d need to clean.
True, two sides of the medal. I would also have to test and play with an ARM64 system before knowing its real limits. Yet it sounds promising for being a possible solution for many problems, like getting rid of Intels Management Engine, having many more hours of battery, aso. Basic functionality should always work without problems, like web browser, mail, office products, editors, ide,…
There is no VirtualBox for ARM, it‘s x86 only. There are chances that QEMU is capable of emulating x86 instructions, but it might be slow as hell. But without testing, it is hard to say, wether it is working just fast enough, or not. Maybe it‘s good idea to get a rasperry pi to play a little.
And a 15 inch screen with only 1080 is not enough nowadays when 4k is even on the smartphones. I really don’t like to see the black lines between the pixels, so I am personally holding off until a better screen will be available on the Librem15.
+1 on this and related ideas (32+ GB RAM, possible Librem 17, quad core, etc)
Very interested in buying a Librem but I’d like to wait until the v4 to get better specs, when did the v3 come out and are there any ETAs on v4? Cheers to Purism team, keep fighting the good fight
At this point I really just want to see better performance in them. I’m fine with everything else, I’m just not going to drop $3,000+ for a laptop that runs on a dual-core.
I’d love to see something like a Quad-Core or better Coffeelake in it. Or at least a quad-core Skylake.
I mean, I’d absolutely love if the i7-8700K was an option when selecting parts. That would be a processor good enough that, if paired with super-fast DDR4 memory and NVMe Pro SSD, even the computer’s lack of a GPU is pretty ignorable for everything aside from the most GPU-intensive stuff.
I’d also love to see 32GB memory as an option as well as 16GB is just standard. ECC memory and 4k resolution would be very nice to see on the options list.
We just need more options. We all have different desires and needs and I think they should just make it less of a “fixed” deal where “this is what it is and that’s your only option”, and it’s pretty baseline at that.
Edit: Oh, and I’ll just repeat the sentiment on the need for an ethernet port. Some of us down want to broadcast our traffic wirelessly, and also the kind of people that buy Librem laptops are technical people and sometimes we need to connect to things via an ethernet connection - like when we’re working on our router firmware and stuff.
