Feature requests/Wish list for the Librem 11/Librem tablet

Hardware
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(Sorry for the wall of text introduction :sweat_smile:, if you’re not interested in that intro you can skip ahead)
Hey there :raised_hand_with_fingers_splayed:, I recently took a liking in using a tablet (wasn’t really interested before as it was just an other useless gadget to me, probably because I just don’t like iOS and Android to start with) when I tried a Microsoft Surface in a store and I liked the concept (I do some doodles from time to time and would like to get an easy to carry around device that is bigger than a smartphone but not as big as a laptop, mostly for web surfing and messing around), but the big problem here is that even if Microsoft does good hardware I really can’t trust them, so I tried to look around for alternatives but I got stuck in a wall due to multiples factors that was bad company practices (no refund of Windows license as the European rules gives me the right to and/or child labor + workers enslavement (looking at you Samsung) and/or spying on users even if they changed the OS with shady firmwares and/or purposely bad UEFI conception), custom kernel needed, shady tablets that would fit a dual boot of Windows 10 and Android on 32GB eMMC with voodoo magic, irreparability/not upgradable, very old asthmatic CPU, World Heavyweight Champion, super expensive for what is delivered… (I might miss some but I think I listed everything I had in mind, I might modify that if I think about another bad thing I came across)

So I knew that Purism had a project for a FLOSS tablet but I didn’t heard anything about it for a while, and then I saw a post somewhere (maybe here, I don’t really remember) that Purism was working on it again so I got very exited about it and I wanted to propose a thread for the community to put their ideas of things they would like to see on the Librem 11. (you can even post fantasy things :wink:)

I’ll start with thing that I think would be cool to see:
Magnetic pen (kinda like MS Surface) (just a pen would be awesome tho, the magnetic thing is just a bonus)
8th (or +) gen Intel CPU (without MEI would be super sweet) (a low power 4 cores CPU would be nice)
Lots of ports (because I never have enough USB ports and good old jack is a must-have)
4GB (or more) of RAM (preferably not soldered) (because I just can’t get enough)
1920x1080 screen (more would seem overkill to me but I’m sure that lots of people have interest in better screens) (IPS or OLED would be a cool choice)
Kill-switches (well it’s a Librem device)

Things that I dream of but won’t exist until a while:
RISC-V based CPU (or any free architecture, POWER9 seems nice too)
FLOSS GPU

I’m looking forward to what you want to see in such a device. :smiley:

1 Like
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I would love to see Purism tear a page from the design of Samsung’s Chromebook Plus v1 and Run-Like-Hell before the alarms go off. It would by far be my favourite laptop. If not for the fact that it will no longer boot into the Arch installation on the SD card.

NXP is coming out with the big brother of the i.MX8M, the i.MX8QuadMax. Which is a 2xA72 + 4xA53 + 2xM4 CPU. The RAM is probably limited to 4GB, though. Would be an interesting choice.

As cool as POWER9 is I don’t think IBM sees an incentive to put it into a laptop form-factor. Maybe someone might have seen Linus Torvald’s thoughts on what would get ARM into servers and apply that to POWER9.

RISC-V would be superb.

Oh, and a trackpoint.

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Pretty sure its up to 8GB on the big one. And PCIe 3.0 which could be used for fast nvme ssds or thunderbolt, in which case ssds could use sata which is still fast enough for a tablet i think.

I think this is not to unlikely as the experience on the L5 R&D could be reused on a tablet. Also the software bits needed in PureOS are allredy in good place.

I would add to the wish list, that the pen digitizer should be a wacom aes 2.0. This would give high percision presure and tilt but more importantly a wide choise of pens to use.

Thunderbolt would be nice to connect a dock with eGPU, for e.g. more complex grapic programs which would be nice for creatives in combination with the wacom pens.

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Thunderbolt would be awesome but ATM it’s proprietary so we would need to wait for USB 4 to get the new “open” Thunderbolt 3. (Not much infos about the open factor here if it’s just Open Source or FLOSS)

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I‘m not that deep into the thunderbolt chips, firmeware and driver openness, but as far as i thought many harwarrparts are closed source and used by purism. Even if closed firmeware is used by them as long as it is not updateable, as it could be considered hardware. On the driver side i think there are thunderbolt driveres in the kernel so they should be floss.