Overall very happy with my Librem 13 - as already mentioned several times. But updates - and with them small little surprises - boy, would it have been a big laptop-manufacturer without having my special purism-sympathy-bonus … the box would have long gone back…
There were wrong key-associations. Manually fixed. Over time with one update they came back.
There were fans running wild. Manually fixed. Over time … update … back.
…
Sound for videos died. Came with an update some weeks ago. Not fixed yet.
Latest: The screen starts to flicker - sometimes till display dies. Came with an update short while ago. Not fixed yet - but i’ll have to as sometimes it’s unbearable.
I’m IT-affine and spending bloody lot of hours in front of those computers. But i’m no explitic Linux-geek. Above mentioned points require deep understanding of Linux-internals. Or somebody that has that knowledge.
Life’s interesting. Always new little surprises. But i’ve got to say: For the average user - mass-market - it would be unhandleable.
When i saw that purism by now also brought new services like VPN, social network and co - beside developing the non-ready Librem 5 (already pre-ordered), i’ve got to admit, i was astonished with a slightly bitter aftertaste. @nicole.faerber@mladen Girls and boys, i wish you best of luck and success. But shouldn’t you care a bit more about quality and stability, fast growth could become a really big problem for your company.
I often advocated in the best possible way for purism, librems. I’ll stop it for now.
First of all, thank you for your open feedback, which I do appreciate.
But I have a hard time to pinpoint the issues based on your description. For example you mention “fan running wild” and that you manually fixed this. How? Then we may find the root cause why you experienced and prevent others from experiencing the same. The only “wild fan” I am aware of is an issue after resume from RAM which only happens seldom. We are aware of this issue and still can not fully pin point its cause and thus can not yet fix it. As a work around suspending again usually helps.
Sound for videos died? What more exactly do you mean here? When did it happen and when did it stop again?
What “key associations” are you talking about? When did they go wrong and when did they work again?
Etc.
I am working on a Purism laptop (L13) since I joined Purism, I use PureOS and the only issue from the ones you describe that I also faced and still face is the seldom “fan at full speed on resume” problem.
If there are issues in PureOS please use the bug tracker of PureOS to report these so that we can address and fix them: https://tracker.pureos.net/
If there are hardware problems with your laptop, and the display flicker you describe hints to be one, please get in touch with
support@puri.sm
so that we can address this as well.
Quality is important to us. We are working with and on our own products and try to address issues as quickly as we can. But we internally for sure do not see or find all issues that might be in our products and in all possible use cases. That’s why we need your feedback.
In Purebrowser, audio of (twitter?) videos was always heavily distorted for me about a year ago, which was one of the reasons I switched to Brave.
Didn’t really check ever since.
The display flicker could be related to the wireless problems some describe, although I did not experience these for a long time now.
@ajlok, I understand the sentiment of your post, and that some of those things can be frustrating. I would also love to have all these things rock solid. But I also see that sheer man power does not solve all of these immediately. As IT guy you know how ugly the happens-sometimes issues are to figure out. Also, Purism added a lot of staff, so it should not be less people dedicated to fixing bugs
Ok, that’s it. I’ve been nosing around Purism for several months now, looking for a reason to replace my aging iPhone and MacBook Pro with Purism’s freedom and privacy-respecting alternatives. I also want to move off of iCloud, Google Drive, and all the other Big Tech software, services, and apps I’m using.
As much as I want to support all that Purism stands for, I’m going to have to stick with Apple for now. I just can’t see how a non-techie like me is going to be able to go with the required learning curve. I’m busy. I need to be able to have it all “just work.”
I will re-visit Purism a few years from now to see if it’s any easier to switch over.
Have been busy. Just saw there were answers. To tidy up:
Key associations: (german) were a topic here in the forum and on tracker. the fixes mentioned there worked for me.
Fan: It was the after resume thing several persons mentioned (there were posts here in the forum).
Flicker: That one was nasty. And funny enough it’s gone again.
The main thing about that: Those mentioned problems were all somehow tied to updating the system (PureOS). No problems. Update. Suddenly there they are. OR Known problems fixed. Weeks or months later. An update. And suddenly there they are again.
The flickering directly started after an update. And it was awesome. Screen suddenly started to flicker. Got worse. Screen dies. Send laptop to sleep. Restart. Works. After a minute or some seconds flickering starts again. Till dying. Something one really needs most, when having to lift a lot of work…
The really interesting thing: Updating daily. Some days later directly after an update the problems were gone. No flickering. Nothing. Just as it used to work almost since a year.
The point - from my point of view - in this: The daily updates usually in almost all of the cases worked great. But there were some - probably max a handfull - that introduced or re-introduced already known problems.
To put it in the right perspective: MS-users tended to have much bigger problems during the last two years… My mentioned ones were not vital - just a bit stressing. So no really big deal.
Anyways - users usually don’t want to have to care to much about their computer. Mainly they just want to use it without taking notice…
