We’ve gotten a lot of requests to see pictures of the Librem 14 instead of just renders. Recently we were able to take some time away from testing on our second round of EVT samples to take some high quality pictures to show the current state of things as well as highlight some of the final tweaks we still want to make so the Librem 14 is perfect before we ship.
Read more here:
He is freed up to ship more Librem 5s!
Kidding apart, totally get it. Thanks for sharing the status and the pictures. It looks pretty sweet - and cant wait to see even more. Any update on the 1 NVME + Bigger Battery / 2 NVME + Smaller battery concept?
The Librem 14 will have 2 SATA/NVMe 80mm M.2 slots.
Thanks Kyle. So I am clear, I’m referring to Nicole’s post in this thread: “7a) we are currently looking into giving two choices, 45Wh and 55Wh. The 55Wh option has 4 cells, the 45Wh 3 cells, i.e. the 4 cell battery is larger and will block the second M.2 2280 SSD slot. Some may choose a larger battery over two storage slots, some may prefer two storage slots. We will announce the options shortly.”
Ahh, no update on that front that I’m aware of. I’m sure we will publish something if it becomes an option.
No worries. Cool with it either way. Just thought it was a neat concept. Anyhow keep up the great work!
Well…disappointed, of course, but honestly glad you are taking the time to tweak out some things and find bugs. Best in the long term, but I will still go throw several temper tantrums in the meantime. 
Nice! But take your time to get it right, I am patient.
I absolutely love the keyboard layout, especially the arrow keys and home-end-pgup-pgdn thing.
Slightly worried that power button is so close to the backspace. Perhaps it’s no big deal, if a momentary press on the power button does nothing by default.
Can’t wait to get my hands on it.
We also want to tweak the print next to the hardware kill switch LEDs so they are larger and on top of the LEDs.
it’d be nice to have the HKS of the L14 themselves light up. as in, make the HKS themselves LED lit, like RGB mechanical keyboards are.
by the way i think the new UHK-v2 (open-hardware/free-software keyboard) from Ultimate-Gadget-Labs is a kick-ass RGB implementation. not that i’d want RGB in the L14-HKS.
the other thing i wanted to ask about is, how fast will one NVME m2 Samsung 980-PRO run at if it’s inserted in the L14 ? @ pcie 3.0 speed at x8 or pcie 3.0 x4 ? as i understand it the electrical lanes should be available to the CPU since the iGPU isn’t as powerful as to require anything above x8 pcie-3.0 (could it go up to 16x ?)
i assume the one currently listed on the L14 web-site config (NVME drive available) is an 970-PRO but the new one is out.
the only thing with 980-pro vs 970-pro for people to keep in mind is that the newer 980-pro uses TLC (triple-level-cell) vs MLC (multi-level-cell) so the 970-pro might be the better option if drive-longevity is a top priority.
that being said the 980-pro is WAY faster if that is the top priority.
so for people that haven’t YET ordered/configured the L14 on the Purism shop-page, you will have to decide what YOUR priorities are …
When ordering it doesn’t specify, or at least it didn’t for me when ordering, anything other than the size of the drive and whether it was nvme. Then again it was a while ago so I’m not sure…
I already commented and thanked on Mastodon, but I wanted to mention here something I didn’t there, which is, I’m glad that you all are taking the 64gb RAM thing seriously. It is a true differentiating on the Librem 14 compared to EVERY other 13" laptop out there.
It has always angered me the way computer companies have relegated certain sizes of laptop to different types of workloads. They think that if you want light and small that you don’t need RAM, or other more workload oriented things. But I mean why can’t someone who wants light and small ALSO want workload related things?! Don’t tell me it isn’t possible, because I have a Onemix 3pt which says otherwise. So thanks Purism, for bucking that trend as well, and for trying to give us the beefiest 13" laptop you could!
On another note: I would be ok with the kill switches being slightly recessed the way they are in the EVT2. No accidental snags, and this is good for the underlying mechanics not getting unnecessarily stressed. But I’m also someone who doesn’t use them as frequently as perhaps your other customers.
I would guess that i7-10xxxU chipsets only support PCIe 3.0 x 4 (so no x 8) and I would assume that you could have x 4 for each of the two NVMe drives (so, if you configure for RAID-0, that’s some serious disk bandwidth). I believe a theoretical maximum of x 16 (lanes available) but I can’t say that that many are actually available. (As you say, the Intel integrated graphics aren’t going to require a massive number of lanes, as a high-end dedicated GPU would.)
Same if the Librem 15 ever comes with that keyboard/trackpad layout I’d buy instantly.
Here are some pictures of an EVT2 sample so you can see the minor improvements we’d still like to make. In the front view you can see the keyboard layout is almost there. We want to tweak the print of the letters to be a bit thinner and improve the overall quality of the keyboard printing (you can see an example of room for improvement in the F3 key).
@Kyle_Rankin Is there any chance the keyboard layout can be fixed to include a better arrow key layout using half keys for left and right like this
The current layout with all the keys next to eachother is honestly horrible in that it’s very difficult to feel which key you’re on/use them without looking at the keyboard. A lot of modern laptop keyboards suffer from this issue unfortunately 
[edit] I’ve only ever met people who don’t like the current layout, very surprising to finally run into someone that prefers it
This is a worse layout. Tiny arrow keys makes my fingers cramp.
The keyboard layout is set and is not trivial to change at this point. Basically everyone has very strong opinions about keyboard layout, the problem is that no one agrees about it!
However, even an old dog can learn a new trick, and given how many keyboard layouts I’ve switched between over the years (the Fn/Ctrl and Esc key placement on the thinkpads was the worst), what I’ve noticed is that things are annoying for a week or two, but after awhile your brain adapts. This is true for when key position changes slightly (such as in the case of migrating from a full-size desktop keyboard to a 90% or smaller laptop keyboard) as well as adapting to key placement (Fn/Ctrl and Esc on thinkpads).
Everyone should give their brain (and muscle memory) more credit! It’s more adaptable than you think.
