The new QCA6391 is for sure a fine chip and we at Purim would not be shy to manufacture an M.2 with it / for it, if such a product did not exist yet. But as far as I have found all new chips that have been released for the past, I’d say, five years or even more more require binary only firmware download to the chip at runtime, i.e. the driver will do this during init.
Creating a free firmware is a huge can of worms. It starts with the problem that chip makers like Qualcomm do not release any information about their chips. And even if, then it would be close to impossible to release a product based on this with the freedom guarantee we all want, because regulations are against us. First Purism would have to go through the whole qualification process with this firmware, which is painfully expensive, and then we, as a commercial and legally liable entity, would have to lock it down so that end users can not modify it anymore - this is what FCC regulations dictate.
So WiFi/BT cards and of course also cellular modems for that matter, are a PITA and an extremely tough nut to crack. It takes many person years to do the engineering, a huge pile of money for qualification testing and even then, for a company, regulations keep you away from fully reaching the goal.
With the sata drive out of the way (esp for the limited space of the Librem 13) we would now have more room to fit dual channel memory, a larger battery, and most of all – improve the thermal management design of the Librem 13 which will improve sustained performance (by reducing thermal throttling) & improve fan power consumption (which in turn improves battery life).
3-point suggestion to improve the heat dissipation design using off-the-shelf components:
Wider heat pipe -
whilst flattening heat pipes reduce their efficiency the mobile form factor really asks for it, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about it. As the table below shows, a heat pipe will carry more heat for every millimetre of its width as the heat pipe gets wider (so one wide heat pipe will actually carry more heat than 2 heat pipes of the same height but half the width).
Wider exhaust mouth for the fan to fit a Wider Heat Sink -
to increase heat dissipation surface area both when the fan is idle (passive) and when it’s blowing.
Slightly Longer Heat Pipe with the Least Amount of Bend -
the thermal conductivity of heat pipes (which is typically around 10,000 to 100,000 W/m.K) actually varies with the length of the heat pipe.
Measured heat pipe effective thermal conductivity as function of length. Note that the 200mm long heat pipe has more than twice the thermal conductivity of the 100mm long heat pipe.
Not likely, our only hope it seems is RISC-V (or OpenPOWER), hope they’ll be mature enough to jump into in 5yrs. Purism should probably start investing in some chip design expertise for risc-v a year or two from now to accelerate & influence the design direction of the most promising open-source risc-v chips in development.
As for now we should just go for Ryzen (by AMD with TSMC), they have the more promising roadmap for next 3-5 years for x86 and a better business model than Intel; both AMD & TSMC are being lead by Engineers with Ph.Ds not by another MBA CEO like Intel’s.
Part of the reason I bought a Librem laptop even though I don’t care about FOSS*, was because it was user repairable, and the company (at the time) appeared to stand behind it, and support those people needing it repaired. (I am not casting a stone, I know that money doesn’t grow on trees, and that Purism is doing all they can with the constraints they have.)
I also got it because the hardware, free as it was, supported the software I needed. IE: x86 based. If it was a RISC’d based system, or ARM based, I wouldn’t be here, nor would I, I imagine, ever be here.
I just want my stuff to work and be compatible.
*I care about the freedom to use the device as I see fit, privacy, and security, but I don’t believe open source is the white knight everyone here believes it is.
it’s a bird. no! it’s a plane. no ! it’s just Linus Torvalds sitting in his bathrobe and slippers keeping calm and trolling the other kernel-geeks while social-distancing
A MUST:
a. No blobs required for PCI components, like wifi or bluetooth (if they are PCI). If a component has a USB interface, and there is a blobless component with same functionality, the physical configuration should make it possible to replace the component with the blobless one. (Example: it must be possible to replace intel wifi, if it is originally included and is connected via USB, with an ath9k wifi).
b. Ability to use good old HDD as an internal drive, not SSD. And it must be possible to replace it with a screwdriver, but not a soldering iron.
c. The battery must be removable without unscrewing any screws. If I want to cut off electrisity, it has to be possible to do this very quickly.
d. Physical ethernet port.
e. USB ports with 4 pins (non-apple, I don’t know the official name, USB 2.0 or USB 3.0, maybe).
A wish:
There are a lot of posts on this forum every now and then about engineering problems of the laptops. I would prefer that, keeping all “electronic” freedom, a purism laptop used as many as possible of components of old thinkpads (I am not talking about chips now, I am talking about things like the external case first of all).
This is the exact opposite of the situation. Comes with ath9k and some customers choose to replace with Intel WiFi or similar i.e. gaining performance and losing privacy / security.
I respect that that is your wish but your wish is in conflict with that of some others. I’ve never owned a Linux computer that has a good old HDD. I would rather have dual NVMe slots than have one NVMe slot and one SATA slot. SATA is bulky and slow.
Perhaps a compromise would be some way of having an internally-mounted SATA HDD that connects via an adapter to an internal USB. USB 3.0 is more than fast enough for any traditional HDD. (You could of course use a SATA SSD instead.) While such an adapter is quite small, juggling the space would still be tricky.
I suspect you will be OK anyway though i.e. I suspect that Purism will retain the existing options i.e. no change.
The point you are making about the screwdriver is I am sure shared by many i.e. don’t want soldered down, non-replaceable, non-upgradeable components - as far as is possible.
I’d agree with Kieran. We can’t request old tech that holds back new tech. The tag line of the Librem line is a modern laptop. Considering that there was ways to still use older SATA / IDE based hard drives with USB, I don’t see this as a serious concern.
Also as a fan of Thinkpads, I find it pretty difficult to find a material that is more robust than the Librem’s and still be practical. I mean the Librem laptops are solid chunks of aluminum. Pick one up, it is robust. Hold the right corner of the laptop with the screen open, lift it, and you’ll there is zero flex. Zero.
Seriously, if the hinges were secured as a part of that frame or a steel construct this thing would be the most robust laptop I’ve owned. (I’m not saying a Thinkpad wouldn’t handled drops better, I’m just saying, that cosmetically the Librem would suffer less damage.)
Anyone like me just hoping the screen PPI to be lower? Right now the PPI(especially on the 15”) is just insane.
There are many OSes, programs that are not made for high PPI, so prepare a magnifying lens before you try any of them.
Also, they add burden to the not-so-strong IGPU, without real benefit.
I think someone else did request a FHD option for the 15" screen (as opposed to the 4K UHD right now). However can’t you just configure for FHD output? i.e. the display will prefer to use the native resolution of the panel but can you configure for less than that? (in this case halved in each dimension)
Well, this, I whink would be even better, I’m definitely not against this. I’ve just seen aome discussions above in favor of non-free wifi.
And this, I think, is totally wrong, at least in this generality. By far not all “new tech” should be preferred over the old tech. This is where purism began: by far not all modern intel CPUs should be preferred over the old ME-less versions, most of the mewly available intel CPUs have ME, and therefore are worse than the old pones. Similarly, (at least almost) all SSDs by construction suffer from severe reliability issues, their very physical construction does not allow you to write in the same physical sector more that ca. 1000 times. And this is becoming only worse with new drives, with the increasing number of *LC. If purism can include an SSD that is free of these issues, I would be happy with it. But I don’t think such a thing exists.
Sure, maintaining old tech when the “new” tech doesn’t provide any advantage. But preferring old tech to new tech despite the advantages is what I’m talking about. Otherwise we keep going down that rabbit hole until we reach the ultimate digital security and don’t use any computer at all.
Let’s keep the baby and just get rid of the bath water. That is the point of Purism and the reason they market it as a modern laptop.
Regarding your critique of the drives, I’ve yet to have any but a crappy Corsair ssd fail on me. Such is the case that even if they did the speed benefits alone would still make them worth it.
I’m sure there is ample room in the Librem 15 for sata, but for the Librem 13 it is better off without one & simply have 2 SSDs instead. Both HDDs & SSDs die eventually let’s not forget that, but if one is worried about endurance, one can always just go for a higher capacity MLC SSD , other than that, it is very important to remember that apart from the glaring difference in speed, SSDs offer better security overall because they are less prone to damage/corruption from impact & EM radiation, HDDs also opens up an avenue for acoustic side channel attacks(leaks) even if the device is airgapped (yes even if you turn off your wifi/blutooth/camera/mic).
True, there is a very easy solution if you want a lower ppi, but if you want a higher ppi – ZERO, you will need to plug your laptop to a high ppi display, so Librem laptops might as well have the higher ppi, although I’m not against Purism offering configurable screen options, that would satisfy both of us (I certainly want a high ppi screen).
I’m not so sure you can actually have any real privacy & security with a closed source software & hardware; it might be possible with a formally verified software & hardware but then the designers/verifiers can always hide parts of the specification sheet from the public or even issue a limited specification sheet to the verifiers(more sinister). There is actually more conflicts of interest between these big name pc makers & retail customers than you actually realise.
More importantly though, in the long run if we want better software, hardware, performance etc it is important to remember that closed source software & hardware actually slow the progress of things, can you imagine a world without any FOSS software, no Linux, no LLVM or GCC, no git, just to name a few things that actually accelerate software development & slash cost & make the world less Orwellian.
The good thing though is that there is no shortage of options if this is not what you want, there is HP’s Elite & Z series, Lenovo Thinkpads, Dell Latitudes & Precision notebooks, these lines are well made & have very good support, they’re all x86, and they supposedly offer more “security” features (*wink *wink) compared to the average notebook.
Even The Linus Trovalds is now using Ryzen for his main machine! 
