Qubes OS will ship pre-installed on Purism’s security-focused Librem 13 laptop

Since I'm completely surprised by this project and very attracted to it I thought it was best to google around for some perspective. Found this http://www.pcworld.com/article/2960524/laptop-computers/why-...

Among other things. My first question was, is the hardware open? Couldn't find an answer to that.

Edit: Apparently revision 2 of Purism will possibly have Coreboot.

Also worth noting is the Novena, which has similar goals: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena

Novena contains 4x Cortex A9 CPU, thet is much less power and not enough power for more serious work :(

I just benchmarked my shiny new Asus Chromebook Flip (4-core ARM) against my ludicrously overpowered desktop (12-core Xeon E5-1650). I ran povray --benchmark, so it was a float-heavy number-crunching exercise.

The figures were about 1500 CPU-seconds for the desktop and 3000 CPU-seconds for the Chromebook. Of course, wall-clock time was significantly less for the desktop due to having many more cores, but that's showing that per-core, the high-end Intel was only about twice as fast as the ARM.

I do development work on the Chromebook, via a Debian chroot inside Crouton. And you know what? It's fine. It's probably the fastest laptop I've ever owned. The filesystem's a little slow, but compilation speeds are perfectly adequate.

> via a Debian chroot inside Crouton

Try a native install on the Flip, it is nice: http://kmkeen.com/c100p-tweaks/

From that page:

> The C100P Flip is the best netbook I have seen in eight years.

That's quite the praise! This thing must be really good.

> The default ALSA config was completely silent. Enabling Right Speaker Mixer Right/Left DAC fixed that. Supposedly there is a risk of burning out the amp if you thoughtlessly enable every option.

Uhh... wow. Well, OK.

> After suspend/resume, wifi will not work if the btsdio module was automatically loaded.

The best netbook in eight years, yet it can't even suspend/resume properly? What?

> The best video output mode is X11 video output. Despite what everyone says about being slow, this is the only driver that doesn't have major desync problems.

> Stellarium would run at a buttery smooth 60 FPS for a few minutes and then everything would die.

> Chromium will not run on this hardware.

> Screen rotation through xrandr doesn't work at all...

Then under "Things to Fix":

> - HMDI output. Very wonky, usually crashes X11 after a few minutes.

> - USB ethernet. The cdc_ether module will load but nothing happens.

> - Webcam. Crazy bucket of fail here. Maybe 25% of the time fswebcam can grab a single frame. Good luck with video.

> - Multitouch on the panel. No idea how to get that working.

To me, —even with the fixes and workarounds you describe— that device sounds like a nightmare to use.

As a counter, ChromeOS will boot from cold in about five seconds. It's got a web browser, file browser, video and music player (with super-slick video quality --- no tearing!), the WiFi just works, there's built in support for mapping the caps key to ctrl, it maintains and updates itself, all the fiddly audio and touchscreen and gestures all just work.

And then if I want to use a real OS, I switch to my fullscreen Debian installation running awesome and all my xterms and it all just seamlessly interoperates. Except I don't need NetworkManager or PulseAudio or any of that nonsense because ChromeOS does it all for me. The brightness buttons work! The audio volume buttons work! Suspend and resume works! Everything works! There's even two-way clipboard support! Which works!

I've been using Linux for years, and I think this is the first time I have ever had a Linux-based laptop where all this stuff wasn't a total PITA.

> The brightness buttons work! The audio volume buttons work! Suspend and resume works! Everything works!

I can't remember when I last had a Thinkpad where any of that didn't work out of the box with Linux.