Two Librem Minis were announced in 2020, none since. I have been quite enjoying my Mini v2 but would like to buy an upgrade or a new (other) Purism desktop.
Any hints, rumors, predictions for new models?
What do you imagine as an upgrade?
Do you have any particular wishes in mind?
Librem Mini already can hold up to 64 GB of RAM.
The WiFi adapter upgradable and more a matter of would you like to use non open source drivers.
The only thing that comes to mind is the processor. But the one that Librem mini now uses is already pretty powerful and going for a better one would mean a huge jump in the price, especially if Purism need to put some development effort to account for anything that does not fit their philosophy.
What I would love to see in the future is hardware not made in PRC. It does not need to be made in the USA, but at least some sort of diversification from the PRC monopoly like Thailand, Japan, East Europe, something like that.
In general maybe currently Librem 5 is the main focus. And I think this makes sense. If Librem 5 is successful, this would long term attract attention to the company and to the other products as well. So this is a huge growth factor. While L14 and L-mini are great products, but not game changers that would lead to a huge growth at the moment.
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This.
Also, in the Librem Mini form factor (ultra compact) there’s only so much you can fit / expect.
So for a major upgrade / major upgradeability, you are really looking at a desktop (as the OP mentions).
Number of disks could be something that someone might want to upgrade.
@MrChromebox said when the Mini v2 was announced that they chose the 4-core i7-10510U, because it was hard to get the 6-core i7-10710U (which is used in the L14 v1) at the time. I suspect that Purism is limited to what the OEM wants to offer. I would like to see Purism offer both an i5 and i7 CPU in the Mini, since I don’t think there is enough performance difference to justify paying for an i7.
If you are just doing normal computer work, I doubt that you will notice much difference between the 10th gen CPU in the Mini v2 versus the latest 12th gen U-series processor. Having the latest processor matters if you are doing something like video rendering, but for most people, there isn’t much difference, because modern CPUs already have more than enough processing power for normal tasks. Where you may notice the difference is between the UHD graphics in the i7-10510U and the Iris Xe graphics in 12th gen Alder Lake U-series processors. The 12th gen processors are also more energy efficient, since they have the smaller 10nm node (which intel is now calling “7nm” to keep up with TSMC/Samsung marketing), but this is probably not something you will notice unless you are really sensitive to differences in fan noise.
However, if you need a powerful Coreboot machine, your best option is to buy a MSI PRO Z690-A WiFi DDR4 motherboard and install Coreboot on it. Of course that involves building your own PC, but it is exciting to finally be able to build an up-to-date Coreboot desktop PC.
I am happy with the Mini v2, just interested in general with what updates may be pending of any kind. Thinking of buying a second Mini v2 and repurposing my current one for another task in the home but would go for bumped specs for my personal machine if there were any upgrades coming just simply to extend the life of the machine. The most processor-intensive task I might have is video transcoding which I haven’t tried on the Mini v2 yet.
As far as other desktops, I would be really curious if Purism would ever do a tower like the Thelio by System76 (lacks coreboot, has preserved AMD PSP and Intel ME as far as I can tell so is a nonstarter for me).
I suspect it would not happen due to cost, but I would be interested in what Purism could do with an open-spec Power9 system (ie - like Raptor Computing’s Talos),
The MSI PRO is exciting, I agree. Not possible to disable Mangement Engine on Alder Lake processors like on Comet Lake, though, right?
I googled it, and this is what I found: https://www.reddit.com/r/coreboot/comments/vjlnke/can_hap_be_used_to_disable_me_on_alder_lake/
I’m not sure which of the HECI disable options need to be set, since there are many of them:
HECI_DISABLE_USING_SMM,
DISABLE_HECI1_AT_PRE_BOOT,
SOC_INTEL_COMMON_BLOCK_HECI1_DISABLE_USING_SBI, SOC_INTEL_COMMON_BLOCK_HECI1_DISABLE_USING_PMC_IPC, SOC_INTEL_COMMON_BLOCK_HECI1_DISABLE_USING_PCR