Introducing the Librem 11

I wish Purism would have gone with a display ratio closer to the golden ration, the current wide screen format is only useful for video viewing and not as much for productivity, such as reading documents, editing documents etc in Landscape Mode.

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It makes me wonder why someone would need more than 4Gb on a tablet ?
As Iā€™m writing this I have gimp, libreoffice, firefox, and a movie and Iā€™m under 2Gb of used RAM
I hardly go over this number on a normal use with my main computer, the big numbers comes when sounds/movies editing, or big games
I really donā€™t understand this race over who will provide the more RAM, more RAM = more power consumption, and higher cost
So I would prefer the overkill 8G, over the mega-overkill 16Gb

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Qubes OS: it has not been properly addressed with the Librem 11, so hopefully more information will come from Purism later.

For comparison, I use at least 24 GB of RAM on my Librem 14, and I have 64 GB total.

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These are tablets with keyboards and a stylus and one can attach external monitors. They are basically convertible between tablet ā†’ laptop ā†’ desktop. In fact the Starlite V is just the next in line from the Starlite IV which is a laptop. I would never consider buying a laptop with less than 16GB RAM.

I find that hard to believe unless this only counts a recent start with very little work-in-progress and Iā€™m not sure it would represent ongoing usage.

I have firefox, emacs, libreoffice, and a pdf viewer as my main applications running. Of course in firefox Iā€™ve got approximately 20 open tabs including a jupyter session. It also has two users logged in right now. Firefox, alone, is using 1.2GB (800MB for me + 400MB for the other user) of RES memory and almost 8GB of VIRT. My python3 jupyter session is a week old and itā€™s using 450MB or RES memory ā€” sometimes it gets very big. Libreoffice (with very little work) is using 250MB RES. My pdfviewer is taking up 400MB RES. The total for everything is 6GB RES out of 16GB.

DDR5 RAM consumes about 20% less power than DD4 RAM. Also, laptop RAM is about 10% more efficient than desktop RAM. Thus an extra 8GB of DDR5 laptop RAM is about an extra 2.25 Watts of power when not in a power saving state. Of course it depends how often itā€™s in a power saving state, but the extra RAM might decrease battery life by up to 10%.

RAM cost is not huge these days. The issue is that since they solder the RAM in tablets, you canā€™t easily upgrade. Thatā€™s limiting the lifetime. In terms of RAM costs and the fact that RAM requirements are always increasing, perhaps an anecdote is in order: One of my early PCā€™s I paid an extra $200 to have 8MB of RAM (yes I said MB and not GB) instead of 4MB.

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I think you are mistaken. They did!

16:9 (classic widescreen) ā€¦ 1.7777ā€¦
16:10 (actual Librem 11) ā€¦ 1.6
Golden ratio ā€¦ 1.618 (approx.)

If thatā€™s what you want, whatā€™s to complain about?

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Ok i stand corrected thanks for pointing that out. I was thinking more of a 1.5, that is why I said closer to, I think it should be slightly less. But its good it is not a 16x9 (which is terrible on laptops as well). I donā€™t think 1.5 has a name but if you think of the best device that exists for reading it is a Book:

As you can see itā€™s more between 1.5-1.6.

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Channeling your inner Bill Gates? :wink:

I donā€™t know how you manage all that under 2GB. Maybe it depends on a) how much RAM you actually have, and b) what distro you are using, and c) some tuning parameters.

The computer Iā€™m sitting on at the moment is using over 2GB doing bugger all (a few tabs in Firefox, Thunderbird, nautilus, and some shell windows).

Obviously Linux uses spare RAM for caching files - and so the total amount of RAM also impacts on perceived disk performance. (That may not be so important on the Librem 11, where the M.2 NVMe PCIe 3.0x4 lane disk should run very sweetly.)

Edit: PS If you are going to solder, it is better to err on the side of caution i.e. too much RAM rather than too little.

Thereā€™s a bit of a ā€œcreativeā€ vibe about the Librem 11, so that would lend itself to applications that require more than average amounts of RAM.

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As already stated Iā€™m not interested by your trolls anymore

When I wrote that, I also thought about those 640kb from bill gates :sweat_smile:

When I wrote my previous post I was at a total of 2.8 Gb with buff/cache
Right now Iā€™m at 2,084Gb and 3.077 Gb for buff/cache with a 2h40 uptime

I agree with that, but still 8Gb is feels overkill to me, unless you want it for fat editing, big games and VM hosting
I would think more about buying a regular computer for those than a tablet
But I donā€™t know :man_shrugging:, maybe I have a wrong view about what regular people do on tablets, also maybe society is shifting ā€œPC-lessā€ to favour a more tablets oriented usage of computers (which will require more and more RAM on those)

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I guess Purism would have one eye on how well Qubes might run - where weā€™re not talking about running classic Virtual Machines as such (such as needing to host Microsoft ā€œThe Bloatā€ Windows or, dare I say it, Android alongside your standard Linux VM) but just in using virtualisation for isolation.

As a different example of isolation, I am now running two browsers (for isolation purposes) and so now my usage is a shade over 3GB, and caching is a whopping 5GB - while still doing bugger all (thereā€™s now also a gedit window). So thereā€™s your 8GB right there. Of course, the only reason that Linux is using 5GB for caching is that the memory is readily available without compromising free memory in the event of a sudden surge in demand.

As another data point, throwing an image from a reasonably current iPhone into GIMP (would also be comparable with the rear camera sensor on the Librem 5), GIMP reports that the image is using 114 MB in memory. Thatā€™s just for one image. Do something fancy in GIMP like keeping previous revisions in memory (so that you can reverse a change if your editing goes pear-shaped) or like working on more than one image at a time because you want to combine images in some way / messing around with multiple layers ā€¦ and that can add up fairly quickly.

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Iā€™m not aware of any EU law banning Qi charging, this is a feature present on all flagship phones sold in Europe.

With Qi2, the devices align magnetically to a stand, and this is the trend for mobile devices (e.g. Google Pixel tablet just made Nest Hub obsolete:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRRYRhFLrbY)

Appleā€™s new StandbyMode is laying the groundwork for a similar form-factor for their iPads and iPhones to do the same (Iā€™m annoyed at how much I love iOS 17ā€™s StandBy mode ā€” hereā€™s why).

It is a great way to get around shorter battery life, as it is easy to ensure itā€™s always charged. Just missing from Purism is a Gnome Setting to limit charging to 80%.

With this addition, Purism expands itā€™s market segment to include smart home hubs (HomeAssistant/OpenHab), and perhaps even voice assistants (OpenVoice/Mycroft/Neon + OpenAssistant).

Another form factor to consider is the true laptop/tablet hybrid, though this is more complex (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYFnAnmwG5c)

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[alleged quote] [blablabla] some off mark crap [blablabla]

  1. You included the above as some sort of alleged quote from me. I said none of that, so either put it all in brackets or donā€™t reference me in the quote.
  2. My comment was just facts and personal experiences. If you arenā€™t interested in hearing what I have to say, then block me. Itā€™s easy.

2h40 uptime? I guess people use their devices differently. I have 24days uptime on the device I was talking about.

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The StarLite 5 from StarLabs mentioned above has a 1.5 ratio.

Iā€™m glad Purism went with 16:10 instead of the horrid 16:9, but a 15:10 would be better, and for PDFs 4:3 would be even better.

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You should know that I didnā€™t even get to see your response. It was flagged and hidden long before I saw it. That should let you know that others in ā€œthe communityā€ think you behaved inappropriately.

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I guess that just illustrates that it simply isnā€™t possible to satisfy all of the people all of the time, as far as screen aspect ratio goes.

I presume from your comment you are talking about a PDF document that is produced for an ISO standard ā€œpaperā€ size (at least outside of the US), where the aspect ratio is always sqrt(2):1 i.e. about 1.414 to 1.

Aspect ratio is not the only screen consideration though. Two others are:

  • physical size - a larger screen is more forgiving of an aspect ratio that is not ideal for the particular task at hand but the larger screen may weigh more and be more cumbersome
  • resolution - taking into account the physical size and the typical viewing distance gives the optimal resolution (any lower and the pixels become evident, any higher and you likely increase power consumption for negligible benefit)
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New information from the Introducing the Librem 11 blog article:

  • Has onboard speakers.
  • Uses PureBoot Basic.
  • The microSD card slot is not flush with the chassis.

Also missed some information from the Purism web shop:

  • Battery: 7.6 V, 3500 mAh
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Thereā€™s very little footage of actual pen usage in the video (only a short part using it in Blender to rotate the view) but latency does not look that bad. I hope there will come another video with MyPaint, GIMP or Krita using the pen with different brushes.

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Sad about the lack of killswitches, but other than that, looks pretty good.

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Surprisingly low charge capacity.

Less than the Librem 5.
Edit: As has been pointed out, this is not a fair comparison because the voltages are different.

What does that mean exactly? The card sticks out slightly when a card is inserted for use?

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The slot itself is indented/depressed, similar to the touchpad on the Librem 14.

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Iā€™m pretty sure the voltages are different making this comparison not quite apples to apples. This is why watthour ratings are typically used when comparing laptop batteries. Watthours compares total energy stored whereas amphours is affected by (tied to) voltage.

Neither really does a good job of showing the usefulness of the battery as it doesnā€™t give you any context for power draw by the device nor discharge rate which will also vary based on how the device is used.

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