Librem 14 Launch

Hardware
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Now, this laptop has me excited, 6 cores-12 threads, 4.7 Ghz. This is as good or better than the latest ASUS laptop, with six cores. I didn’t go for the 13", because it had the legacy SATA port. Also, there was no financing. Now, with 2x SATA-NVMe M.2 ports, the legacy hardware barrier is completely gone. Also stuffing the 14" display into the 13" Librem footprint, makes this an easy decision, because, I didn’t want to go back to a larger form-factor. I haven’t tested this yet; but, I have a “Klarna” account; and, they “do” support purchases from “System76.” I did a mock run on adding the Librem 14", from a Google search; and, it looks like it’s going to take it. Does Purism have their own financing partners?

BTW, breaking-up consumer purchases into 4 equal parts has been working in Latin America, for well over a decade. I’m glad to see the US financial system allowing this model.

I’m not going to preorder: because, I want this baby’s teething pains worked out first; but, there’s no longer a entry barrier for me.

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I think I remember something about Purism allowing multi-part payments through Stripe, but I could be wrong. If someone else knows for sure, they should chime in.

Edit: @Freedom_Right is correct. I mixed up Stripe and Splitit.

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Purism also offers interest free monthly payment plans by Spliit (by your credit card and without credit check):
https://puri.sm/faq/what-forms-of-payment-do-you-accept/

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I, too, am looking forward to the promise but I won’t be an early buyer after only one year of productive use out of my Librem 13. Hinges. I want to see the hinges. :slight_smile:

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Is the new 14" still legacy BIOS, or are we upgraded to EFI yet?

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@jt7d36fd in my opinion EFI would be a downgrade compared to the complete open source coreboot/seabios or the more secure more complex in the handling pureboot.
In my opinion that’s what makes the Librems stand out in the Group of Linux Laptops.

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With Coreboot/Seabios, are we still only limited to 4 primary partitions? This is “not” very flexible.

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AFAIK yes and from my understanding it’s the same with pureboot.
But since I’ve never needed more than 4 more like 2 or 3 I’d be really interested what you are doing with it?

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Is TianoCore not completely open source?

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I would hope so - as to do otherwise would probably make it somewhat non-standard and not interchangeable with other computers.

The DOS partitioning scheme has a hard limit of 4 partitions. That’s why GPT exists. Extensions to the DOS partitioning scheme that allow more than 4 partitions do exist but they are completely non-standard.

Maybe you are asking: can I use BIOS with GPT? i.e. does the BIOS support GPT?

That is a somewhat non-standard combination that is sometimes supported.

As others are implying, fully supporting EFI will solve two problems (the partition problem and trying to boot PureOS on a wider range of non-Purism hardware).

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I only have one computer and that is a Laptop.

My ideal setup is x2 internal NVMe. M.2 drives, capacity 2TB each. The first drive will be my system drive, the second my backup drive. Drive 1, sda 1TB. Drive 2 sdb, 2TB.

Drive 1, sda is my system drive. I will usually have at least x2 linux distros. The first-distro will be my “banking & document-processing” distro. The second-distro will be my media processing distro, i.e. Unbuntu-Studio, etc. With this configuration, including SWAP, there is no more room on the first drive in BIOS mode.

I would like to be able to install at least x2 - 3 more distros on “sda.” The third distro would be a high security-anonymity distro like Qubes, Mofo Linux, Kali, Tails, Parrot, Kodachi, Black Arch, etc. The fourth-distro might be a portable server, email, e-commerce, etc. The fifth distro, would be purely developmental-experimental, which I would replace when I’ve learned everything I wanted to know about it, or decided to try another distro.

The second drive, sdb would be for storing an image of Drive 1, sda with clonezilla, or similar tool.

*Yes, I’m using my daily driver as a “development” system. I’m traveling fast and lite and need to keep the widget count lowww, for the benefit of both my wallet and my backpack. Besides, if I wanted to use the Librem 13, 14, etc., purely as a development system, I’d still likely need to be able to launch more than x2 distros per drive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah EFI is non-standard: so, what? Apple and Micro-Devil have been using it for over a decade. I think there’s a third option, that nobody discusses; but, there is a very mature partitioning system for minis and mainframes that is far superior to GPT and is properly coded, with a rational development history. I forget who makes it; but, it’s proprietary. An open source version of this is definitelty the way to go for the future. Also GRUB 2 is “doody,” especially in EFI mode, as I discovered when I was driving Fedora, back in 2017.

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With Ubuntu, and no doubt other distros, you can use a swap file instead of a swap partition. That will make better use of the limited 4 partitions.

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that’s an very interesting setup somewhat similar to what I’m using.
In my case all the other distros exist as KVM virtual machines on top of Fedora.
I think you could work around your 4 Primary partition Problem with LVM which I think was develop for exactly that reason.
Makes the installation of them a little bit more complicated but that way you can have as many Logical Partition as you want. There is even a rather nice gui for handling most of those tasks.
That would also make the backups to the second disk way easier than using clonezilla since the feature is baked into the concept.

It should also be possible to integrate all of those Distros into Qubes as VMs which is what I’m planing to do when I get my Librem14.
My Problem with EFI is that in every implementation that I’ve ever come across the chain of trust it is based on relies on keys that are not in the control of the User or at least Purism. If i remember correctly Grub or some middle stage Bootloader still needs to be signed by Microsoft for linux to run on EFI Systems.
I’d still be happy to be able to use PureOS on systems that have EFI instead of Bios to get it wider adopted.

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I think it’s a pre-GRUB shim that has been signed by Microsoft.

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Purism fuses its CPUs to not require a signed bootloader.

Unlike Windows, Linux has no problem booting from logical partitions and there is no limit on those. Is there some reason in particular that you want primary partitions?

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Perhaps, I don’t properly understand how logical partitions work, or I ran into some other limitation, when I originally researched them. In other words, "I don’t know.":disappointed:

So far the suggestions I’ve received sound like running VMs. I’ve done this before and it’s slow and IMHO kind of lame. Is that not what’s being suggested? As a thought experiment, let’s assume I want to add six “different” linux distros in addition to pureOS on SDA. Is that possible? What would that look like?

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One other thought.

Clearly, I’m thinking of GPT not EFI. I fat-fingered it, sorry.

*That being said, what level of effort would be required to offer “coreboot-GPT,” as an “option,” with the buyer’s understanding, that the unit will not be as secure as the “coreboot-seabios” units?
Also, is it possible to take a poll, to see who might be interested, in such an option? That way no resourses need be reserved or effort expended, if there’s no reasonable interest.

I suspect that there will be no real downside to this since, having made no promises to the buyer, you can take your time to perfect the security of the GPT implementation.

This seems like a possible, if not ideal scenario.

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I don’t speak for Purism but I think the direction that they are going in is to support EFI. I expect that that would mean that GPT would be supported too (although that is not a requirement of the UEFI spec). I have no idea on the “when and if”.

I don’t see any need to compromise e.g. on security as far as Coreboot-GPT goes. If it works at all (a big if unless code is written for it), I would expect it to be as secure as Coreboot-MBR (for want of a better term).

You can create a poll yourself?

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You could consider containers if your OSs can use the same kernel, they are lightweight in comparison to virtual machines, for ex. Docker:

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If you use Coreboot, yes it still uses Seabios, Pureboot uses Heads