Very happy with my Librem 15 v3, which I received (in the UK) just over a month ago and use as my work laptop connected to an HDMI screen and various other peripherals. It is perfect for dev work - 16GB RAM is plenty, and no need for HDD with a 500GB SSD.
When I received it I booted once to PureOS and verified the coreboot config, then repartitioned the disk and set up LUKS on LVM for full disk encryption and installed Arch Linux, which runs very well.
Things I love
- Awesome continuing work from Purism on the massive task of freeing all hardware and software in the modern laptop, doing so transparently while still ending up with a beautiful self-contained product.
- Case: build quality excellent, ports just right (only one I would add is ethernet, but it would increase case thickness, and an ethernet to USB adapter works fine).
- Full keyboard with numpad and arrow keys, rare on laptops.
- Kill switches <3
- The lack of graphics card means the laptop is lighter, cooler, and much quieter than my colleagues’ MacBook Pros, and since I am not doing heavy graphics work or gaming on this machine it is not missed.
Improvements for the next iteration
- As mentioned elsewhere on the forum, there are occasional issues with wifi, typically in poor signal-strength situations or where constant roaming is required. I use a USB wifi dongle at work (my home network works fine with the internal wifi antenna) so this is not an issue for me.
I highly recommend the Librem 15. Regarding @A.production’s question regarding other products, I believe you will have difficulty achieving a similar level of security and privacy in a laptop form factor without downgrading the spec (the “old ThinkPad” option).