Hello everyone! So I’m seriously considering purchasing a Librem 14; primarily for Video/Audio editing and secondly for some ‘light’ gaming. Long story short, I have had it with both Windows and Apple but I still need them for certain functions (I could go on and on on that topic alone!). For the Video/Audio editing, everything looks solid. For the gaming, however, it looks to be a bit trickier.
So getting to my question: Processor seems great, RAM seems great, the greatest issue is the intel video card that comes with Librem 14. I did some digging and realized that AMD is open source. Are there AMD cards that can be swapped out for Librem 14’s Intel video card? If so, which AMD cards work with Librem 14’s laptop form factor?
Since the GPU is part of the CPU it can not be taken out or replaced. There is also not practical way to use an external GPU, I’m afraid.
Just a note concerning AMD and “open source”, yes, they have open source drivers, but they require significant binary firmware blobs at runtime, which is why Purism so far did not use AMD CPU (like Ryzen), the integrated Intel GPUs do not require a firmware blob to work.
Thank you very much for that clarification! This is definitely new territory for me. Although, I have already dipped my toe into the Linux world (I’ve got a Raspberry Pi 4 which I’m using to run both Raspbian and an ARM Build of Windows 11).
For user control reasons, I hope we see a rise in Linux and open source gaming. But for the video/audio end, it looks like Linux is catching up!
