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Purism Aims to Build a Philosophically Pure Laptop

200 points by ogcricket 12y ago

sebnap 12y ago
Start purism by removing the numpad ...
oconnore 12y ago
How do they do Wi-Fi? Bluetooth?
- rosser 12y ago
  Bluetooth isn't mentioned on the campaign page [1], but the wifi is ath9k. [1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop
  - david-given 12y ago
    Last I heard, radio firmware pretty much had to be locked down or the regulators wouldn't certify you; the principle here being that as all modern radio chipsets are basically software-defined radios, they're indistinguishable from incredibly effective jammers. They consider the right to dial emergency services on a cell phone and have it work to be more important than the right to play with hardware. So I'm interested to see that there's actual open source firmware for the ath9k, and it looks like the hardware will accept unsigned firmware images. Have the rules changed? Or are the regulators simply less concerned about wifi relative to mobile phone radios?
    - bvttf 12y ago
      Long answer: http://youtu.be/WOcYTqoSQ68 http://youtu.be/WOcYTqoSQ68 Short answer, iirc the atheros will usually play within the rules, and the free drivers aren't super officially supported so what those crazy hackers do isn't so much their responsibility. But that's based on half-remembering that talk, which I watched five months ago.
delinka 12y ago
"...uncontrolled by outside forces..." Who validates the silicon and how is this accomplished? We've known for quite some time about the potential for rogue circuits hiding amongst the millions of transistors.
- joezydeco 12y ago
  Especially that 500GB HDD. What open-source firmware is loaded onto that?
  - yueri 12y ago
    From the website: "There are also hardware components, like the HD or SSD, that are flashable, and therefore upgradeable, but that currently run firmware that is not yet freed. We are working to get freed versions of this firmware! Being the first manufacturer to care about freedom and privacy, we are making a lot of progress upstream."
    - ansible 12y ago
      I am skeptical they are going to get firmware for the hard drive. It would be easier to make your own SSD from nand flash chips and write your own firmware.
yzzxy 12y ago
On a similar note, I've recently become very interested in buying a Lemote laptop. It's exactly the tiny form factor I'm looking, runs an open MIPS chip, and comes preinstalled with some version of Linux, though I'd probably load Gentoo as it's said to work quite well. The various models run $150-300 in USD depending on the supplier, from what I can tell. Unfortunately it's very hard to buy these computers in the US, and I will probably have to pick it up on some future trip to China. I would definitely a Massdrop or crowdfunding campaign to send purchase a set from the Chinese distributor.
- chx 12y ago
  No need to travel to China for that. http://www.aliexpress.com/item/2014-New-arrival-Free-shipping-Yilong-8089B-Loongson-CPU-inside-mini-laptop-notebook-computer-linux-pc/1849497039.html http://www.aliexpress.com/item/2014-New-arrival-Free-shippin... But yes, the few European vendors have no stock and on Aliexpress this is the single result.
  - Sir_Substance 12y ago
    There's no way I would spend $100 on something on aliexpress, last time I used them I was shipped an empty bag.
    - jiffytick 12y ago
      well, my anecdotal experience with a chinese vendor was ok; the device i ordered was as they described it. Ymmv.
    - Tinyyy 12y ago
      Well you could try to get a chargeback if they don’t deliver a proper product.
      - Sir_Substance 12y ago
        After it became clear their fraud department was not interested in resolving the problem and was trying to stall beyond the chargeback window, that's exactly what I did.
pingswept 12y ago
This appears to be similar to the open source hardware Novena laptop (https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop), but closed source hardware. From the Purism crowdfunding campaign: "The Librem 15 is the first high-end laptop where you are in control and have complete visibility into the kernel, the operating system, and all software." It seems like the Novena came first and is substantially more free/open. A laptop running all open source software is still good, but it's not as pure as claimed.
- rl3 12y ago
  It would be amazing if Novena or other projects like it evolved into something resembling Google's Project Ara, but for laptops instead of phones. Laptops have unfortunately never really achieved the modularity and ease of modification that PCs have. They are seemingly perpetual slaves to cost, form factor and all the concerns that follow.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Panasonic rugged devices are modular, so it's technically feasible, even if the economics are not there yet. ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/panasonic/business/toughpad/downloads/Panasonic-Toughpad-FZ-M1-Configurations.pdf
  - TD-Linux 12y ago
    The Novena is pretty good in that its schematics are entirely open source. It also has plenty of expansion headers, a FPGA, removable RAM and wifi cards. However, I don't think modularity is as important, because it's hard to make something modular, performant, AND low cost. If you have the sources, you can always make a customized version to suit your exact needs yourself, without the need for it to be modular. (typing this from my Novena)
    - XorNot 12y ago
      Project Ara seems like it might solve that problem itself. A laptop chassis which was just a GIANT Ara frame maybe?
stephen-mw 12y ago
I'm excited about a company that will ensure a good, compatible experience with linux on a laptop. I develop on mac osx and linux vms (vagrant). I want to move to linux but the linux desktop experience just isn't there yet.
- javert 12y ago
  For me, the linux desktop experience is there. So I guess it depends on what you want. There's nothing I want to do I can't do on Linux as well or better, except play games, and that's not enough of a factor for me to not prefer Linux.
  - SwellJoe 12y ago
    These days, most of the games I play are readily available and work well on Linux. All of the Valve Source games have been ported, Civ V works great, many independent and upcoming titles on Steam have good Linux versions. Steam has been really good for Linux games. I pretty much have no reason to reboot into Windows. I used to reboot for Netflix, but now it works in recent Chrome versions on Linux. That said, I've used Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1995 (but always with a backup Windows partition), so I'm not the ideal person to look to for whether Linux is ready for the desktop...it's been ready for my desktop for a couple decades. But, I think now I'm at a point where I don't feel any need to have a Windows partition, for anything.
  - rtpg 12y ago
    From my testing, the macbook air is one of the better laptops on the market now in terms of battery life and general feel (the touchpad is second to none in my opinion). But even for a laptop this prevalent, getting it to work with Ubuntu is a pain, and you run into a bunch of little bugs consistently. I understand that it's a major uphill battle, but over the many many laptops I've tried to use with Linux, I've not found one that offers a good experience when it comes to the things that are important to a laptop (like battery life, secondary display support, and the like). I'm totally cool with using Linux on a desktop (though I don't own a desktop anymore), had some great experiences even when going full Arch.
javert 12y ago
A good idea but tainted by association with Stallman and therefore with Stallman's made-up, non-empirical, false morality.
netvarun 12y ago
The 10^6$ question is whether Richard Stallman[1] would use this? [1]http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/ http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  That's a bit outdated - Stallman's now using a ThinkPad X60: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html OT, but an amusing line from that page: > I never pay for anything on the Web. Anything on the net that requires payment, I don't do. Or more succintly: > Out, out, damned Spotify! Flick off, Netflix!
  - pconner 12y ago
    It would be pretty hard to run netflix in emacs anyway
    - serf 12y ago
      don't say things like that out loud. the emacs repos are already too crowded. we'll have a netflix-mode by sun-up.
      - Retra 12y ago
        I wouldn't worry too much, as there isn't a netflix-mode-by-sun-up-mode, as far as I can tell.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    The coreboot X60 is interesting. I have a non-core boot X61s Lenovo that happens to have an ath5k wifi card built in (there are various different configurations of the X61s so don't assume they will all have an Atheros card) and I have not seen a Linux it could not run. OpenBSD works fine, so I assume that other BSDs would. A little underpowered by today's standards, and tends to get warm if you are compiling a lot of stuff or other processor intensive applications, but fine for what I do most days.
BrainInAJar 12y ago
What CPU is it running? Because last time I checked the Intel microcode wasn't open source
- IThoughtYouGNU 12y ago
  The FSF doesn't care if microcode is open source.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Nor are the actual Intel or AMD chip designs overall.
  - BrainInAJar 12y ago
    Exactly. Unless it's running an opencores CPU (or OpenSPARC), it's not anywhere near a "philosophically pure laptop"
- serf 12y ago
  an i7, which while proprietary doesn't necessarily have to be bundled with the typical Intel AMT, which the FSF dislikes[1]. Besides the CPU, it contains proprietary nVidia chips. Another company which doesn't have too stellar of a 'open' record. [1]: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/active-management-technology https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/active-management-techno...
  - minthd 12y ago
    The chip this uses , the i7-4770HQ , uses vt-d. According to invisible labs[1], vt-d can allow certain malware attacks. Afaik, even after being informed of this by invisible labs researchers, intel did nothing(afaik) to solve this. [1]http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.co.il/2011/05/following-white-rabbit-software-attacks.html http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.co.il/2011/05/following-w...
    - walterbell 12y ago
      It was mitigated in software and fixed in post-2011 hardware, http://xen.1045712.n5.nabble.com/Xen-security-advisory-CVE-2011-1898-VT-d-PCI-passthrough-MSI-td4390298.html http://xen.1045712.n5.nabble.com/Xen-security-advisory-CVE-2...
enupten 12y ago
I wish it was more Thinkpad-y rather than Macbook-y; especially since Lenovo -I've heard- is well on its way to ruining the former.
- bla2 12y ago
  The newest Carbon X1 looks pretty good, at least compared to the previous model.
  - TheCowboy 12y ago
    It would be nice if Lenovo provided the option of the classic Thinkpad keyboard. I'm considering going with a used Thinkpad as my next laptop for that reason. Laptop choice seems to have become a monoculture of Apple clones. If Purism would provide that keyboard option I would find it hard to resist.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Goldtouch (derived from Lexmark/IBM aesthetics) makes ergo keyboards and has mobile (foldable) USB and BT versions, http://allthingsergo.com/blog/reviews/goldtouch-keyboard-review/ http://allthingsergo.com/blog/reviews/goldtouch-keyboard-rev...
  - enupten 12y ago
    Yeah, but it doesn't the Trackpoint buttons.. which makes it infinitely worse.
    - bhassel 12y ago
      The newest (2015) X1 Carbon brought back those buttons: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8821/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon-broadwell-version http://www.anandtech.com/show/8821/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon...
- walterbell 12y ago
  Lenovo has thankfully reversed course in 2015 after customers revolted at the Vista-like "innovations" in 2014.
pmalynin 12y ago
For that price the components seems rather inadequate. 4GiB RAM for $1800? Come on.
- john2x 12y ago
  Yeah. It doesn't even come with cake!
superuser2 12y ago
A truly philosophically pure laptop would, among other things, guarantee absolutely no involvement of slave labor/abusive practices in its supply chain. Everyone from the mines to the assembly plant to the retail store would have secure, middle-class employment. Revenue would not fund political corruption or violence related to labor, natural resources, or environmental impact. But it would not contain binary blobs either, so this is a positive step. The branding is a little grandiose for the extent of its "philosophical purity," though.
- orblivion 12y ago
  Depends what philosophy you're talking about.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- wyager 12y ago
  That may be your philosophy. I care more about open computer systems than making everyone middle class (which doesn't even make sense; by the well-ordering principle, there will always be a lower class). I think that open computers are more important for the long-term improvement of the human race than the pursuit of presently unrealizable economic goals.
  - xamolxix 12y ago
    > I care more about open computer systems than making everyone middle class The parent speaks about slave labour or something very close to it not about living in the suburbs. > there will always be a lower class That is your opinion and it may be true. Even so, the "lower class" could live without the worry of basic necessities. A lot of people do not currently have that luxury.
    - yoklov 12y ago
      > That is your opinion Well, it's not really an opinion though. Unless everybody had a perfectly equal standard of living (which sounds vaguely Harrison Bergeron-esque) there will always be a lower class, even if they have a rather high standard of living. Other than that, I agree with everything you say in your comment.
sarciszewski 12y ago
Nearly $2000 for a laptop I could have bought for that price in early 2008? Sorry, call me a stickler, but I just don't see the value here.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Fine, if you don't perceive value, then you are not part of the target market for this product/project. Enjoy your current choice of hardware and software. Other people may see value where you do not however.
  - sarciszewski 12y ago
    4 GB of RAM and 500 GB HDD sounds like a hand-me-down I'd get from my grandma, not a new cutting edge laptop. What exactly justifies that cost?
    - Semiapies 12y ago
      Ideology.
    - keithpeter 12y ago
      I'm typing this on a Georgian reproduction then :-) Thinkpad X61s with 2.5Gb RAM and 100Gb hard drive. Runs Kubuntu 15.04 alpha very responsively (with baloo working) and allows me to complete office/planning type tasks.
knappador 12y ago
The future of anything we wish was built out of philosophical purism is to be built on crowdfunding. As for this particular case, SSD > liberty for me. I'd rather boot at a reasonable speed than die waiting to copy files.
adamnemecek 12y ago
I'm surprised no one has said this yet but I can testify that a numpad keyboard on a laptop is like the worst ergonomic design that is somehow currently still popular. It's one of the things where I literally cannot comprehend how someone would think that it is ok.
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  How is it any worse than the rest of the keyboard, in terms of ergonomics?
  - adamnemecek 12y ago
    I just found this which says exactly what my thoughts are http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-stupidest-trend-in-laptop-design-is.html http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-stupidest-trend-...
    - walterbell 12y ago
      The group therapy laptop UX comments on that post are hilarious.
    - yoklov 12y ago
      That's a fairly compelling argument, but I definitely have had times where I wished for a numpad on my Macbook, mainly so that I could play games that required them (I went through a few months where I played through several traditional roguelikes, and this isn't uncommon in that genre, though vikeys is more common and far better IMO).
      - gerbal 12y ago
        Fortunately, there are lots of hardware solutions to that problem. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&Description=keypad http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&De...
- gambiting 12y ago
pmontra 12y ago
Partially offtopic, but looking at the case of that laptop I wondered if I am the only one that slides them to the right to have the touchpad and the spacebar aligned with the central symmetry axis of my body? That means having 2/3 of the screen to the right of my eyes, which is a waste because I end up piling windows with important information to the left, for not having to tilt my head to the right. I believe that the reason for that (IMHO) ergonomically poor design is the will to include the numberpad. With the exception of Macs it's difficult to find any 15+" laptop without a numberpad. Is that feature so important? My numberpad lies there unused since I bought my zbook 15 one year ago. Maybe if I were playing games I would find a use for it. I write specs or code, so there are no many numbers I must type and it's easier to reach for them on the row above the letter keys. How about optional cases without a number pad and centered keyboard and touchpad? I'd pay an extra for that (plus another extra for a 16:10 screen, but that another story). Or maybe people wanting a number pad should pay an extra. I wonder what are the numbers for the two groups of people "I must have a number pad" and "I don't use it".
- ansible 12y ago
  Yeah, I don't find the number pad at all useful, yet there it is on virtually all laptops. The last decent laptop that didn't have it was the Lenovo W530. But the latest version, the W540 has the number pad too. Sigh. I just want a halfway decent laptop with a 15in screen, without an optical drive or number pad. But paying Macbook Pro prices feels like a punch in the gut.
  - ptomato 12y ago
    Configuring the W540 you mentioned identically to the base model 15" RMBP ($2000) costs $1850. RMBP is ~ 1 lb lighter and .4" thinner, has a faster SSD, and gets about 3 hours more battery life. W540 has an optical drive, a removable battery, and a workstation graphics card. (Surprisingly, though, raw performance of that seems to be pretty similar to the Iris Pro 5200 in the RMBP, based on my minimal research.) In any case, $150 doesn't seem like an unreasonable difference to me, particularly considering Apple makes actually usable touchpads. (Reviews seems to indicate that the W540 touchpad is as bad as such things usually are.)
davidw 12y ago
This looks pretty cool to me. I've been happy with the Ubuntu/Dell efforts over the years, but it's really, really good to see people working on nice Linux machines.
unicornporn 12y ago
So, does it really offer something that this doesn't: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GIVX0FM/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GIVX0FM/ ? Except for silver casing...
- lukasm 12y ago
  It doesn't have SSD, so in my book it's not high performance(a bit too big as well). IIRC Ubuntu sends some analytics data. There is no guarantee about the rest.
Morphling 12y ago
They talk about ensuring that open source works on the machine, anyone else concerned if they will try to inhibit close source software? Like this whole shitstorm around GCC?
- TelmoMenezes 12y ago
  “absolutely free and open and uncontrolled by outside forces ensures complete control of every aspect of the hardware at all times.”
conductor 12y ago
Add hardware switches for the mic, webcam, lan, wifi and bluetooth and you have my money.
- dmm 12y ago
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop/updates/librem-13-and-more https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop/updates/lib... Your wish is granted.
robinho364 12y ago
Stallman, I remember that he used a Loongson computer
- robinho364 12y ago
  Well, currently he is using Thinkpad x60. By the way, I dislike the style of his personal website, which is disordered and primitive.
zkanda 12y ago
Wow, that price is not justifiable, the spec at System76[0] is way better and cheaper. 0. http://www.amazon.com/System76-Galago-Ultrapro-Processor-120GB/dp/B00QQOU5FY/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1422112938&sr=1-1&keywords=System76&pebp=1422112964036&peasin=B00QQOU5FY http://www.amazon.com/System76-Galago-Ultrapro-Processor-120...
- quadrangle 12y ago
  I beg to differ. (I'm unaffiliated and haven't donated btw). The Purism project is not directly comparable. They are doing substantial extra work and hassle and working with different parts. It's not about whether the machine runs a fully-free OS (System 76 running Ubuntu isn't even fully-free as Ubuntu isn't fully-free). It's about even the basic hardware drivers, BIOS, firmware etc. all being free/libre and the extra cost is covering the hassle and specifics of making that happen in the real world today.
coned88 12y ago
Can somebody explain the intel processor freedom thing. They say this is the first intel processor that doesn't rely on a signed bios.
asb 12y ago
You may also be interested in a project a number of us have been working called lowRISC, aiming to produce a fully open-source SoC in volume using the RISC-V instruction set architecture. http://www.lowrisc.org/ http://www.lowrisc.org/ I'm giving a main track talk on it at FOSDEM next weekend: https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/lowrisc/ https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/lowrisc/ so say hi if you're there. My speaker interview gives more background on the project and our motivations https://fosdem.org/2015/interviews/2015-alex-bradbury/ https://fosdem.org/2015/interviews/2015-alex-bradbury/
- aidenn0 12y ago
  I haven't looked at RISC-V much; a quick glance at the ISA spec makes me think it has 32 GPRs? That is nice to see, as with Power slowly fading and Sparc essentially dead, we are stuck with the somewhat more constrained x86-64 and ARM. SBCL, for example, uses 2 stacks in its precise GC, as it will use one stack for unboxed integers and calling out to C, and another for lisp objects, which should be the roots for the GC; on x86-64 it uses a conservative GC for this reason (on ARM they implemented the precise one, but seem to be losing significant performace due to register pressure). In general 16 registers seems to be "just barely enough" most of the time, which translates to "super painful" the few times you could use more.
  - hga 12y ago
    Yep, it's got 32 GPRs, with #0 hardwired to the constant 0. And the lowRISC project is looking into adding two tag bits with a focus on practical security for languages like C, but with the ability to use them for things like GC. Largest nits I see about the RISC-V ISA is no support for integer math error checking aside from divide by zero (a New Jersey design), and per a slide set I found for the January workshop, the work in progress 64 bit VMM mode will only support 43 bits of address space, i.e. "only" 8 TiB, vs. e.g. the 256 TiB of x86-64. Which of course is rather a lot, but I find it uncomfortably close to the DRAM you can put on current systems with Intel CPUs; I've watched this game way too many time in my career.
    - aidenn0 12y ago
ansible 12y ago
So what about this company? What is their reputation? I'm in the market for a Linux laptop with about those specs, but how can I easily compare this to a more established brand in terms of after sales support and overall build quality?
r0s 12y ago
Call me a skeptic, but there's nothing philosophically "pure" about a locked down hardware platform where discrete components are all dependent on each other and NOT user serviceable.

200 points by ogcricket 12y ago

sebnap 12y ago

Start purism by removing the numpad ...

oconnore 12y ago

How do they do Wi-Fi? Bluetooth?

rosser 12y ago
Bluetooth isn't mentioned on the campaign page [1], but the wifi is ath9k. [1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop
- david-given 12y ago
  Last I heard, radio firmware pretty much had to be locked down or the regulators wouldn't certify you; the principle here being that as all modern radio chipsets are basically software-defined radios, they're indistinguishable from incredibly effective jammers. They consider the right to dial emergency services on a cell phone and have it work to be more important than the right to play with hardware. So I'm interested to see that there's actual open source firmware for the ath9k, and it looks like the hardware will accept unsigned firmware images. Have the rules changed? Or are the regulators simply less concerned about wifi relative to mobile phone radios?
  - bvttf 12y ago
    Long answer: http://youtu.be/WOcYTqoSQ68 http://youtu.be/WOcYTqoSQ68 Short answer, iirc the atheros will usually play within the rules, and the free drivers aren't super officially supported so what those crazy hackers do isn't so much their responsibility. But that's based on half-remembering that talk, which I watched five months ago.

delinka 12y ago

"...uncontrolled by outside forces..." Who validates the silicon and how is this accomplished? We've known for quite some time about the potential for rogue circuits hiding amongst the millions of transistors.

joezydeco 12y ago
Especially that 500GB HDD. What open-source firmware is loaded onto that?
- yueri 12y ago
  From the website: "There are also hardware components, like the HD or SSD, that are flashable, and therefore upgradeable, but that currently run firmware that is not yet freed. We are working to get freed versions of this firmware! Being the first manufacturer to care about freedom and privacy, we are making a lot of progress upstream."
  - ansible 12y ago
    I am skeptical they are going to get firmware for the hard drive. It would be easier to make your own SSD from nand flash chips and write your own firmware.

yzzxy 12y ago

On a similar note, I've recently become very interested in buying a Lemote laptop. It's exactly the tiny form factor I'm looking, runs an open MIPS chip, and comes preinstalled with some version of Linux, though I'd probably load Gentoo as it's said to work quite well. The various models run $150-300 in USD depending on the supplier, from what I can tell. Unfortunately it's very hard to buy these computers in the US, and I will probably have to pick it up on some future trip to China. I would definitely a Massdrop or crowdfunding campaign to send purchase a set from the Chinese distributor.

chx 12y ago
No need to travel to China for that. http://www.aliexpress.com/item/2014-New-arrival-Free-shipping-Yilong-8089B-Loongson-CPU-inside-mini-laptop-notebook-computer-linux-pc/1849497039.html http://www.aliexpress.com/item/2014-New-arrival-Free-shippin... But yes, the few European vendors have no stock and on Aliexpress this is the single result.
- Sir_Substance 12y ago
  There's no way I would spend $100 on something on aliexpress, last time I used them I was shipped an empty bag.
  - jiffytick 12y ago
    well, my anecdotal experience with a chinese vendor was ok; the device i ordered was as they described it. Ymmv.
  - Tinyyy 12y ago
    Well you could try to get a chargeback if they don’t deliver a proper product.
    - Sir_Substance 12y ago
      After it became clear their fraud department was not interested in resolving the problem and was trying to stall beyond the chargeback window, that's exactly what I did.

pingswept 12y ago

This appears to be similar to the open source hardware Novena laptop (https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop), but closed source hardware. From the Purism crowdfunding campaign: "The Librem 15 is the first high-end laptop where you are in control and have complete visibility into the kernel, the operating system, and all software." It seems like the Novena came first and is substantially more free/open. A laptop running all open source software is still good, but it's not as pure as claimed.

rl3 12y ago
It would be amazing if Novena or other projects like it evolved into something resembling Google's Project Ara, but for laptops instead of phones. Laptops have unfortunately never really achieved the modularity and ease of modification that PCs have. They are seemingly perpetual slaves to cost, form factor and all the concerns that follow.
- walterbell 12y ago
  Panasonic rugged devices are modular, so it's technically feasible, even if the economics are not there yet. ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/pub/panasonic/business/toughpad/downloads/Panasonic-Toughpad-FZ-M1-Configurations.pdf
- TD-Linux 12y ago
  The Novena is pretty good in that its schematics are entirely open source. It also has plenty of expansion headers, a FPGA, removable RAM and wifi cards. However, I don't think modularity is as important, because it's hard to make something modular, performant, AND low cost. If you have the sources, you can always make a customized version to suit your exact needs yourself, without the need for it to be modular. (typing this from my Novena)
  - XorNot 12y ago
    Project Ara seems like it might solve that problem itself. A laptop chassis which was just a GIANT Ara frame maybe?

stephen-mw 12y ago

I'm excited about a company that will ensure a good, compatible experience with linux on a laptop. I develop on mac osx and linux vms (vagrant). I want to move to linux but the linux desktop experience just isn't there yet.

javert 12y ago
For me, the linux desktop experience is there. So I guess it depends on what you want. There's nothing I want to do I can't do on Linux as well or better, except play games, and that's not enough of a factor for me to not prefer Linux.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  These days, most of the games I play are readily available and work well on Linux. All of the Valve Source games have been ported, Civ V works great, many independent and upcoming titles on Steam have good Linux versions. Steam has been really good for Linux games. I pretty much have no reason to reboot into Windows. I used to reboot for Netflix, but now it works in recent Chrome versions on Linux. That said, I've used Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1995 (but always with a backup Windows partition), so I'm not the ideal person to look to for whether Linux is ready for the desktop...it's been ready for my desktop for a couple decades. But, I think now I'm at a point where I don't feel any need to have a Windows partition, for anything.
- rtpg 12y ago
  From my testing, the macbook air is one of the better laptops on the market now in terms of battery life and general feel (the touchpad is second to none in my opinion). But even for a laptop this prevalent, getting it to work with Ubuntu is a pain, and you run into a bunch of little bugs consistently. I understand that it's a major uphill battle, but over the many many laptops I've tried to use with Linux, I've not found one that offers a good experience when it comes to the things that are important to a laptop (like battery life, secondary display support, and the like). I'm totally cool with using Linux on a desktop (though I don't own a desktop anymore), had some great experiences even when going full Arch.

javert 12y ago

A good idea but tainted by association with Stallman and therefore with Stallman's made-up, non-empirical, false morality.

netvarun 12y ago

The 10^6$ question is whether Richard Stallman[1] would use this? [1]http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/ http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com/

w1ntermute 12y ago
That's a bit outdated - Stallman's now using a ThinkPad X60: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html OT, but an amusing line from that page: > I never pay for anything on the Web. Anything on the net that requires payment, I don't do. Or more succintly: > Out, out, damned Spotify! Flick off, Netflix!
- pconner 12y ago
  It would be pretty hard to run netflix in emacs anyway
  - serf 12y ago
    don't say things like that out loud. the emacs repos are already too crowded. we'll have a netflix-mode by sun-up.
    - Retra 12y ago
      I wouldn't worry too much, as there isn't a netflix-mode-by-sun-up-mode, as far as I can tell.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  The coreboot X60 is interesting. I have a non-core boot X61s Lenovo that happens to have an ath5k wifi card built in (there are various different configurations of the X61s so don't assume they will all have an Atheros card) and I have not seen a Linux it could not run. OpenBSD works fine, so I assume that other BSDs would. A little underpowered by today's standards, and tends to get warm if you are compiling a lot of stuff or other processor intensive applications, but fine for what I do most days.

BrainInAJar 12y ago

What CPU is it running? Because last time I checked the Intel microcode wasn't open source

IThoughtYouGNU 12y ago
The FSF doesn't care if microcode is open source.
MichaelGG 12y ago
Nor are the actual Intel or AMD chip designs overall.
- BrainInAJar 12y ago
  Exactly. Unless it's running an opencores CPU (or OpenSPARC), it's not anywhere near a "philosophically pure laptop"
serf 12y ago
an i7, which while proprietary doesn't necessarily have to be bundled with the typical Intel AMT, which the FSF dislikes[1]. Besides the CPU, it contains proprietary nVidia chips. Another company which doesn't have too stellar of a 'open' record. [1]: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/active-management-technology https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/active-management-techno...
- minthd 12y ago
  The chip this uses , the i7-4770HQ , uses vt-d. According to invisible labs[1], vt-d can allow certain malware attacks. Afaik, even after being informed of this by invisible labs researchers, intel did nothing(afaik) to solve this. [1]http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.co.il/2011/05/following-white-rabbit-software-attacks.html http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.co.il/2011/05/following-w...
  - walterbell 12y ago
    It was mitigated in software and fixed in post-2011 hardware, http://xen.1045712.n5.nabble.com/Xen-security-advisory-CVE-2011-1898-VT-d-PCI-passthrough-MSI-td4390298.html http://xen.1045712.n5.nabble.com/Xen-security-advisory-CVE-2...

enupten 12y ago

I wish it was more Thinkpad-y rather than Macbook-y; especially since Lenovo -I've heard- is well on its way to ruining the former.

bla2 12y ago
The newest Carbon X1 looks pretty good, at least compared to the previous model.
- TheCowboy 12y ago
  It would be nice if Lenovo provided the option of the classic Thinkpad keyboard. I'm considering going with a used Thinkpad as my next laptop for that reason. Laptop choice seems to have become a monoculture of Apple clones. If Purism would provide that keyboard option I would find it hard to resist.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Goldtouch (derived from Lexmark/IBM aesthetics) makes ergo keyboards and has mobile (foldable) USB and BT versions, http://allthingsergo.com/blog/reviews/goldtouch-keyboard-review/ http://allthingsergo.com/blog/reviews/goldtouch-keyboard-rev...
- enupten 12y ago
  Yeah, but it doesn't the Trackpoint buttons.. which makes it infinitely worse.
  - bhassel 12y ago
    The newest (2015) X1 Carbon brought back those buttons: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8821/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon-broadwell-version http://www.anandtech.com/show/8821/lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon...
walterbell 12y ago
Lenovo has thankfully reversed course in 2015 after customers revolted at the Vista-like "innovations" in 2014.

pmalynin 12y ago

For that price the components seems rather inadequate. 4GiB RAM for $1800? Come on.

john2x 12y ago
Yeah. It doesn't even come with cake!

superuser2 12y ago

A truly philosophically pure laptop would, among other things, guarantee absolutely no involvement of slave labor/abusive practices in its supply chain. Everyone from the mines to the assembly plant to the retail store would have secure, middle-class employment. Revenue would not fund political corruption or violence related to labor, natural resources, or environmental impact. But it would not contain binary blobs either, so this is a positive step. The branding is a little grandiose for the extent of its "philosophical purity," though.

orblivion 12y ago
Depends what philosophy you're talking about.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
wyager 12y ago
That may be your philosophy. I care more about open computer systems than making everyone middle class (which doesn't even make sense; by the well-ordering principle, there will always be a lower class). I think that open computers are more important for the long-term improvement of the human race than the pursuit of presently unrealizable economic goals.
- xamolxix 12y ago
  > I care more about open computer systems than making everyone middle class The parent speaks about slave labour or something very close to it not about living in the suburbs. > there will always be a lower class That is your opinion and it may be true. Even so, the "lower class" could live without the worry of basic necessities. A lot of people do not currently have that luxury.
  - yoklov 12y ago
    > That is your opinion Well, it's not really an opinion though. Unless everybody had a perfectly equal standard of living (which sounds vaguely Harrison Bergeron-esque) there will always be a lower class, even if they have a rather high standard of living. Other than that, I agree with everything you say in your comment.

sarciszewski 12y ago

Nearly $2000 for a laptop I could have bought for that price in early 2008? Sorry, call me a stickler, but I just don't see the value here.

keithpeter 12y ago
Fine, if you don't perceive value, then you are not part of the target market for this product/project. Enjoy your current choice of hardware and software. Other people may see value where you do not however.
- sarciszewski 12y ago
  4 GB of RAM and 500 GB HDD sounds like a hand-me-down I'd get from my grandma, not a new cutting edge laptop. What exactly justifies that cost?
  - Semiapies 12y ago
    Ideology.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    I'm typing this on a Georgian reproduction then :-) Thinkpad X61s with 2.5Gb RAM and 100Gb hard drive. Runs Kubuntu 15.04 alpha very responsively (with baloo working) and allows me to complete office/planning type tasks.

knappador 12y ago

The future of anything we wish was built out of philosophical purism is to be built on crowdfunding. As for this particular case, SSD > liberty for me. I'd rather boot at a reasonable speed than die waiting to copy files.

adamnemecek 12y ago

I'm surprised no one has said this yet but I can testify that a numpad keyboard on a laptop is like the worst ergonomic design that is somehow currently still popular. It's one of the things where I literally cannot comprehend how someone would think that it is ok.

jsprogrammer 12y ago
How is it any worse than the rest of the keyboard, in terms of ergonomics?
- adamnemecek 12y ago
  I just found this which says exactly what my thoughts are http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-stupidest-trend-in-laptop-design-is.html http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-stupidest-trend-...
  - walterbell 12y ago
    The group therapy laptop UX comments on that post are hilarious.
  - yoklov 12y ago
    That's a fairly compelling argument, but I definitely have had times where I wished for a numpad on my Macbook, mainly so that I could play games that required them (I went through a few months where I played through several traditional roguelikes, and this isn't uncommon in that genre, though vikeys is more common and far better IMO).
    - gerbal 12y ago
      Fortunately, there are lots of hardware solutions to that problem. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&Description=keypad http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&De...
gambiting 12y ago

pmontra 12y ago

Partially offtopic, but looking at the case of that laptop I wondered if I am the only one that slides them to the right to have the touchpad and the spacebar aligned with the central symmetry axis of my body? That means having 2/3 of the screen to the right of my eyes, which is a waste because I end up piling windows with important information to the left, for not having to tilt my head to the right. I believe that the reason for that (IMHO) ergonomically poor design is the will to include the numberpad. With the exception of Macs it's difficult to find any 15+" laptop without a numberpad. Is that feature so important? My numberpad lies there unused since I bought my zbook 15 one year ago. Maybe if I were playing games I would find a use for it. I write specs or code, so there are no many numbers I must type and it's easier to reach for them on the row above the letter keys. How about optional cases without a number pad and centered keyboard and touchpad? I'd pay an extra for that (plus another extra for a 16:10 screen, but that another story). Or maybe people wanting a number pad should pay an extra. I wonder what are the numbers for the two groups of people "I must have a number pad" and "I don't use it".

ansible 12y ago
Yeah, I don't find the number pad at all useful, yet there it is on virtually all laptops. The last decent laptop that didn't have it was the Lenovo W530. But the latest version, the W540 has the number pad too. Sigh. I just want a halfway decent laptop with a 15in screen, without an optical drive or number pad. But paying Macbook Pro prices feels like a punch in the gut.
- ptomato 12y ago
  Configuring the W540 you mentioned identically to the base model 15" RMBP ($2000) costs $1850. RMBP is ~ 1 lb lighter and .4" thinner, has a faster SSD, and gets about 3 hours more battery life. W540 has an optical drive, a removable battery, and a workstation graphics card. (Surprisingly, though, raw performance of that seems to be pretty similar to the Iris Pro 5200 in the RMBP, based on my minimal research.) In any case, $150 doesn't seem like an unreasonable difference to me, particularly considering Apple makes actually usable touchpads. (Reviews seems to indicate that the W540 touchpad is as bad as such things usually are.)

davidw 12y ago

This looks pretty cool to me. I've been happy with the Ubuntu/Dell efforts over the years, but it's really, really good to see people working on nice Linux machines.

unicornporn 12y ago

So, does it really offer something that this doesn't: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GIVX0FM/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GIVX0FM/ ? Except for silver casing...

lukasm 12y ago
It doesn't have SSD, so in my book it's not high performance(a bit too big as well). IIRC Ubuntu sends some analytics data. There is no guarantee about the rest.

Morphling 12y ago

They talk about ensuring that open source works on the machine, anyone else concerned if they will try to inhibit close source software? Like this whole shitstorm around GCC?

TelmoMenezes 12y ago
“absolutely free and open and uncontrolled by outside forces ensures complete control of every aspect of the hardware at all times.”

conductor 12y ago

Add hardware switches for the mic, webcam, lan, wifi and bluetooth and you have my money.

dmm 12y ago
https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop/updates/librem-13-and-more https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-laptop/updates/lib... Your wish is granted.

robinho364 12y ago

Stallman, I remember that he used a Loongson computer

robinho364 12y ago
Well, currently he is using Thinkpad x60. By the way, I dislike the style of his personal website, which is disordered and primitive.

zkanda 12y ago

Wow, that price is not justifiable, the spec at System76[0] is way better and cheaper. 0. http://www.amazon.com/System76-Galago-Ultrapro-Processor-120GB/dp/B00QQOU5FY/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1422112938&sr=1-1&keywords=System76&pebp=1422112964036&peasin=B00QQOU5FY http://www.amazon.com/System76-Galago-Ultrapro-Processor-120...

quadrangle 12y ago
I beg to differ. (I'm unaffiliated and haven't donated btw). The Purism project is not directly comparable. They are doing substantial extra work and hassle and working with different parts. It's not about whether the machine runs a fully-free OS (System 76 running Ubuntu isn't even fully-free as Ubuntu isn't fully-free). It's about even the basic hardware drivers, BIOS, firmware etc. all being free/libre and the extra cost is covering the hassle and specifics of making that happen in the real world today.

coned88 12y ago

Can somebody explain the intel processor freedom thing. They say this is the first intel processor that doesn't rely on a signed bios.

asb 12y ago

You may also be interested in a project a number of us have been working called lowRISC, aiming to produce a fully open-source SoC in volume using the RISC-V instruction set architecture. http://www.lowrisc.org/ http://www.lowrisc.org/ I'm giving a main track talk on it at FOSDEM next weekend: https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/lowrisc/ https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/lowrisc/ so say hi if you're there. My speaker interview gives more background on the project and our motivations https://fosdem.org/2015/interviews/2015-alex-bradbury/ https://fosdem.org/2015/interviews/2015-alex-bradbury/

aidenn0 12y ago
I haven't looked at RISC-V much; a quick glance at the ISA spec makes me think it has 32 GPRs? That is nice to see, as with Power slowly fading and Sparc essentially dead, we are stuck with the somewhat more constrained x86-64 and ARM. SBCL, for example, uses 2 stacks in its precise GC, as it will use one stack for unboxed integers and calling out to C, and another for lisp objects, which should be the roots for the GC; on x86-64 it uses a conservative GC for this reason (on ARM they implemented the precise one, but seem to be losing significant performace due to register pressure). In general 16 registers seems to be "just barely enough" most of the time, which translates to "super painful" the few times you could use more.
- hga 12y ago
  Yep, it's got 32 GPRs, with #0 hardwired to the constant 0. And the lowRISC project is looking into adding two tag bits with a focus on practical security for languages like C, but with the ability to use them for things like GC. Largest nits I see about the RISC-V ISA is no support for integer math error checking aside from divide by zero (a New Jersey design), and per a slide set I found for the January workshop, the work in progress 64 bit VMM mode will only support 43 bits of address space, i.e. "only" 8 TiB, vs. e.g. the 256 TiB of x86-64. Which of course is rather a lot, but I find it uncomfortably close to the DRAM you can put on current systems with Intel CPUs; I've watched this game way too many time in my career.
  - aidenn0 12y ago

ansible 12y ago

So what about this company? What is their reputation? I'm in the market for a Linux laptop with about those specs, but how can I easily compare this to a more established brand in terms of after sales support and overall build quality?

r0s 12y ago

Call me a skeptic, but there's nothing philosophically "pure" about a locked down hardware platform where discrete components are all dependent on each other and NOT user serviceable.