I’m very disappointed with the post sales support. Latest firmware update for the L14 is broken and has been broken for >6 months. The developers still haven’t commented. I’m beginning to think I might have wasted a lot of money.
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@jonathon.hall was last active on Discourse 11 hours ago, so I suspect they are aware of the situation and are preparing a new PureBoot firmware commit to resolve the issue(s).
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My L14 arrived in late 2023 and I have only really updated firmware maybe once since then. So, because of this, other than any automatic secret background communication with the fwupd service (Fwupd.org Another automatic network request) my device has not updated its firmware.
As such, it seems to have continued running fine. Does this mean that if you run an out of date firmware, yours would run fine as well? I am not entirely certain because I have an L14v1 rather than L14v2, but I assume they are similar. I did a forum search for this and it seemed to be you yourself offering the solution in another thread.
Similar to you downgrading firmware to solve an issue – although I haven’t faced that particular issue – I have many years of familiarity with Linux at this point, and have customized the desktop environment packages, installs, and configurations to my liking on the L14. When I have something I don’t like, I change that thing, and then as a result I have a configuration I do like. And I’m not totally certain that the knowledge for how I got to that point is easily bought or sold.
So if you are considering you “might have wasted a lot of money” when purchasing your L14, the likely possibility is that you did. I say this as someone who loves my L14, but also because it is consistent with other forum users who have complained about purism in the past, for each their own various reasons. Ultimately, whether the L14 is a waste is a matter of subjectivity, and therefore if you think of it as a waste it will become so, in your mind, unfortunately.
In contrast to that, in my life, I have a very expensive Windows Surface that I bought at a retail store with all the bells and whistles many years ago, before I filled my life with Purism hardware. And when I reached the point of realizing that Microsoft had actually locked the BIOS with a password before selling me the laptop, for the purpose of preventing the laptop from booting Linux to ensure they can control me, maybe I enjoy what some folks might call “over-correcting” by ending up here going the other direction. So in my life, paying Microsoft $2500 only to have them literally put their own password on the BIOS before placing the machine into its box to sell as “new” in my case feels like a waste of money. That purchase was the waste of my money. It feels like a form of disrespect. In a similar way, Purism feels like a couple of guys in California who don’t disrespect me, and instead respect my intelligence, but are slowed down sometimes by the humanity of the work they have to do. And I guess I’m just pretty okay with that. For me, my personal L14 is not a waste, and I take it with me everywhere as my main laptop.
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People mean different things by the word “firmware” and there are inconsistencies in how firmware update is handled in the Linux environment for a given piece of firmware.
I could be wrong but I don’t think the Librem 14 checks for updated boot firmware (Pureboot / Coreboot) - and, related, Purism does not use LVFS to distribute the boot firmware. (Purism seems to have a test account on LVFS so I guess they must have thought about using it.)
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Both statements are currently correct.