Hello everyone!
First of all - great job on the new forums. If there’s one thing I’d like to suggest though - try making a full-screen topic creator. I for one don’t care for typing things in this pull-out tab from the bottom of the screen…
Definitely like that you’ve adopted Reddit-like markup though.
Questions
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Are you still going forward with Libreboot? I understand there’s been quite a bit of drama at Libreboot in recent months and I don’t see much of any talk from Purism about it anymore, so that makes me wonder if Purism is dropping it now or something. I know you guys have gotten Coreboot down now it seems, so I would think that discussion about Libreboot would start popping-up at this point.
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Will you be upgrading the processors again soon? Intel has been making quite a few announcements about their processors as of late, so I wonder what Purism is thinking in regards to CPUs. I myself would think that the next roll-out of Librems should have Kabylake in them, and then you’ll be using that until Coffeelake comes out sometime early next year I imagine. However I also read things about a “Kabylake Refresh” coming up and so forth, so the CPU topic has become pretty saturated with choices it seems. But yeah, Intel has dropped a lot of information lately and just wondering what Purism is thinking about it.
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Is PureBrowser basically just a branch of Firefox? It sure looks like one. Can you add Firefox addons and the likes to it? I actually have a custom version of Firefox I’ve been working on and I’m sure that a Linux version could be made.
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After getting Libreboot down, I imagine the rest of the roadmap will be relatively quick, no? It seems to me that the current step you’re on with Coreboot/Libreboot and freeing the ME and everything is the hardest and slowest part. Once you’re beyond that marker, freeing the drive firmware and schematics and getting FSF RYF Certification should go far faster than the rest of roadmap yes? Of course I don’t know, it just seems like this is the biggest incline you’re on right now.
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How easy is PureOS to pick-up for someone that’s used to Windows? I imagine PureOS was made for Linux newbies but I’m still a bit nervous about it, especially when they’re high-dollar. I know for a fact I’ll still need a Windows computer to be my gaming powerhouse though, but my Purism laptop would be for work and secure communication.
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Hope you still have Purism routers and phones in your plans!
Suggestions:
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I hear the hinge cover on Librem 15 is plastic. Is it possible to make it metal like the rest of the chassis? I mean, why make it all metal except that one thing? Figure you should go all the way. I say this especially because I’ve had trouble with my hinges busting out before…egh. It’s the most likely part of the chassis to fail, honestly.
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DuckDuckGo uses Amazon CDN and doesn’t really compete with Google too well in terms of results. StartPage gives you Google results from behind a proxy that expunges as much information as possible and doesn’t have the CDN problem. Further, your image searches are sandboxed behind a proxy, and if you’re cool with not having javascript functionality you can even use StartPage’s proxy service when accessing search results using the “proxy” link beneath them. So yeah, I strongly suggest replacing DuckDuckGo with StartPage.
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I’m sure your videos app is fine and dandy, but I’ve always been impartial to MPC-HC for being incredibly simple but also giving you immense control under the hood if you’re a tech-savvy type. Unfortunately it doesn’t exist for Linux, but there’s another player that I think is good and interesting - GnomeMPV. You might already know what MPV is, and GnomeMPV improves upon that giving it more options and stuff (one complaint about MPV is that it’s TOO simple… there’s not a lot of buttons and dials to play with. This can address that a little). You might want to try it and see if it’s a better video player. My biggest reason for wanting this though is that it will likely support SVP (you may know what it is - but if you don’t, it increases the framerate of videos through “motion-estimated frame interlopation”, basically creating new frames to fill the framerate) because SVP supports MPV, so I imagine it could also support GnomeMPV too. Though I will likely still be using my Windows machine for watching videos as MPC-HC will still probably be better and most importantly, my preferred video-renderer MadVR doesn’t exist for Linux. Still, worth looking into I figure, it may be better than your current videos application.
Just thought I’d toss all of that out there. I ask all of this because I feel I may be skipping the Librem 15 v2 due mainly to financial reasons and going for the v3 when it comes around. I’m hoping you’ll have Kabylake, a metal hingecover, and maybe even Libreboot by then, but I figure that’s a stretch. I could wait until v4 which I figure would come out next year or something if it seems like you’ll have the “Purism Purist Standard” met by then.
Thanks!
PS: If you guys need any help that someone like me could possibly provide then just let me know, it seems like a cool project you’ve got going here and I’m not really doing anything else right now. If you want some idea of what I can I do I guess you can just see my personal site, but it’s pretty juvenile I guess (and I know I’m a bit of a weirdo too). I’m not versed in Linux or anything deep-coding related, but I understand plenty of more top-level or frontend stuff. I know this is probably pretty useless to you though, so fair enough if that’s the case.
