[Note: This thread is intended to be a discussion thread for the topics in this post. Please keep your replies on topic. Some examples of off-topic replies include:
“Any news on Librem 14 shipping?” (When we have news to publish we publish it in its own post.)
“I have a support request.” (These are better handled with the Purism support team.)
“I want to air a personal grievance.” (You can do that in your own topic.)
]
Now that shipping of the Librem 14 to customers is imminent we should talk about some more details and enhancements we made.
Like we mentioned before the outside dimensions are almost the same as the Librem 13 was, so the Librem 14 measures: 322mm x 222mm x 17mm.
The total weight including the 4 cell battery, two SODIMMs and one M.2 SSD is about 1490gr (I am living in Germany, you have to get along with metric units ).
A Walk Around
Let’s have a walk around.
Check out the rest of the post, including brand new pictures of the production Librem 14 here:
So concerning this…
[1] Headset microphone and headset plug-in detection is not yet working. The wiring is there but there is still work that needs to be done on the software side with the codec.
That goes for any external speaker, or anything else, plugged in as well I suppose?
No. There is just a single keyboard layout. There have been threads about the keyboard in this forum that you can dig up if you want to see past discussions on it.
In short, all laptop keyboards are compromises in one way or another and I personally have been able to get used to all sorts of variations whether it’s the Esc and Ctrl/Fn issues with Thinkpad keyboards, various arrow key layouts, or other things. Muscle memory is a powerful thing and I doubt it will take anyone long to adjust to any reasonable laptop keyboard layout.
We support various credit card options via Stripe, cryptocurrencies, direct bank transfers, and a few other methods. You can see them all in the checkout page when you place an order.
Congrats and thanks to all involved people for the hard work!
Display questions:
What is the max. brightness in caldera pro cm²?
How much energy does the backlight consume?
Does it support Panel Self Refresh (PSR) for sake of energy saving
Keyboard:
Wouldn’t be it good for Purism to make a more flexible solution? I think it could make the product interesting for more customers. Maybe an ISO keyboard with different characters printed on the keys or so like Tuxedo does. Could be paid by customers if they want some exotic layout. Just a suggestion to consider. I know that this probably won’t come for L14 and it needs some demand.
I don’t have any tech spec details more precise than what we have at the bottom of the Librem 14 product page.
The way that modern laptops are designed make it difficult for keyboards to be too flexible. Apart from some kind of rubberized overlay (I’ve seen laptop docks employ that) it’s tricky (and even then you are restricted to the current physical key sizes).
Modern laptops tend to glue the keyboard to the frame and then mount the rest of the electronics below it, so it’s non-trivial to swap out. This means you have to maintain stock of each laptop keyboard variation, which means there has to be sufficient demand to justify maintaining that inventory. We tried that in the past with .de and .uk keyboard variants and at least then with that experiment we didn’t find the demand at the time justified maintaining that inventory.
Really happy to see this, and really looking forward to mine.
Would it be possible to a get a full laptop picture Specifically one with the screen open, preferably on, and the keyboard, body of the laptop all visible. The only thing not shown in Nicole’s post was the display.
One other question regarding the web and mic led: This is hardwire so swapping the functionality is not really possible, right? I mean if the led only comes on when the webcam and mic are disabled instead when they are enabled.
The keyboard backlight can be toggled with Fn-F4. And here we have a novelty for the Purism laptops, this can not just be toggle on or off! We now can support multiple brightness levels, right now we have implemented four so that you can tune it to your liking and / or ambient condition.
My Librem 15 has two brightness levels, so it’s not really a novelty, although it is an improvement
Years ago I voted for a German keyboard. I decided to stay with my current laptop and use it longer mainly for ecological reasons and did not by a librem device. Shame on me. To my rescue that poll was about what layout we wanted to see and was not bound to an order.
Maybe Purism can come up at some point in time with a number or an order of magnitude for demand of a keyboard layout to be satisfactory or profitable for Purism. The community could collect orders before making the deal. Or Purism could collect orders under the precondition that the number of orders reach a threshold. Just a suggestion.
For myself I will probably soon decide if I buy an L14 or something else.
Great. I would like to see how the opened display reacts on a little slap. I want to see how (long) it vibrates in situation it gets hit accidentally by an arm or something. I leave it up to you if you include that in your video or make an extra one. If I may ask for that.
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