I’m concerned that while having my Librem 13 on my lap that when the fan kicks in it will draw in dust and what not from the bottom. How does the ventilation work?
@dggregory Hello !
the ventilation works in the followin way:
the librem 13 laptops have a spinning fan underneath that provides cooling for the internal components by sucking air from the underside and circulates it inside. thus to function at maximum capacity the fan needs adequate working conditions. if you want to use the laptop in your lap you will experience a mild heat sensation acumulating under the area that generates the most thermal surplus in the laptop ( the CPU + igpu area + ocasionally the nvme m2 drive if you have one )
also if the fan grill is obstructed by objects the fan performance could be severly hindered and performance drastically reduced or depending on the load on the compute device that could also mean shortened life cycle.
it is recommended that you use it on a flat surface making sure that at least the distance of the underside rubber feet is met.
you could optionally use a dedicated laptop cooling base with dedicated fans to help with cooling if you will have prolonged compute workloads.
it is also recommended depending on how dusty your environment is to periodically check the fan grill and the internal components for dust acumulation to avoid performance degradation and heat-disipation-blocking.
also remember that dependig on your use case your device could be emiting higher-than-expected quantities of radiation (heavy and prolonged use of wireless internet traffic and wifi interferance plus heavy environment radio saturation) thus it is also recommended to not keep your device on close proximity to your body for longer than neccesary periods of time.
hope this helps !
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Whereever you are, if you want to use the laptop on your lap, get a wooden slab or similar between the lap and your laptop (essentially making it a slabtop).
The ventilation sucks when the laptop is on an uneven surface, especially on clothing.
Regardless of that, over time it will always draw in dust and what not.
That’s the big downside of cooling with air ventilation.
As there’s no good alternative cooling method today, pretty much every laptop has that problem.
To get the dust and stuff out, you have to unscrew the back and clean it from time to time with canned air and/or that sticky slime.
Also, the fan only kicks in if the laptop gets too hot, which happens if it is under load. So if you want to keep the fan from kicking in, keep the load low 
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Slabtop on the way. Good ol’ Amazon.
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