I have their laptop and do not recommend them. Honestly, I sort of regret the purchase.
- They lie about specifications like battery life (and other things). I get about 1 hour on my ~5 hour battery life when web browsing.
- My laptop had a race condition at boot that would prevent boot 50% of the time. There was a workaround.
- Wifi had a range of maybe ten feet (not joking).
I am sure there new laptop is better however I do not really trust them after my interactions. Especially for something more novel like a linux phone.
On the other hand, Pine64 is very focused on their hardware stack. All their products are running a very similar hardware unlike Purism. They are moving way more product then Purism and are better liked. Hence they have a stronger community. They are also much cheaper phone-wise for a similar feature set. And you can actually buy and receive the phone.
In terms of alternatives I think System76 is pretty good desktop wise right now. Laptop are alright. Waiting for their upcoming in-house laptop.
This is quite interesting. I'm writing this on their Librem 15 and can't recommend it enough. No problems with booting or anything. Battery life got short with time (but I never cared about it).
> Wifi had a range of maybe ten feet (not joking).
Purism is using the only existing WiFi card that works with free firmware. It is less performant than typical proprietary ones. If you don't care about your freedom strongly, you can replace the card (they are very cheap on ebay). Also, check Purism forums for such questions. It works better than "ten feet" for me.
> On the other hand, Pine64 is very focused on their hardware stack.
And the software is provided by Purism (Phosh, for most Pinephone users). Pinephone is great, I'm using it, too. But Librem 5 is much more performant. Many videos show it's working fine, except of the non-finished software (same as for Pinephone).
> Purism is using the only existing WiFi card that works with free firmware. It is less performant than typical proprietary ones. If you don't care about your freedom strongly, you can replace the card (they are very cheap on ebay). Also, check Purism forums for such questions. It works better than "ten feet" for me.
Not the wifi card, the surround material like the chassis are attenuating the signal (the librem 14 should have fixed this issue). I swapped mine out for a well supported and performant Intel card and only got marginal improvements to the signal.
My "ten feet" was using it at coffee shops. I was traveling with the laptop. It was hard. The card switch did get it over the hump for this use case. Not an issue most of the time but still will have get a spot closer the router for video calls (like standup).
So the constraints for work were getting a seat close the router AND a power plug. I ended up USB tethering with my phone alot.
I do appreciate their contributions to the ecosystem but was wronged as a consumer. They need to be truthful.
I take it you have the v3 with the standard boot drive?
The v4 updated the screen which burned more power. I remember telling them my real life results and them proceeding to not update their product marketing page while admitting it was based on the v3. I feel like they were already stretching it to begin with with v3 but you would know.
I also got the fastest SSD they had in checkout. Which I think contributed to the booting race condition. I never got a link to an upstream ticket so I do not know if it is fixed.
When I emailed them they said they do not have a laptop in that configuration to test, haha.
Sad the high DPI displays didn't go well. My eyes can't take the 1080 vertical pixel displays that are still so common on open laptops nowadays. But I really want to like the Librems; there aren't many trustworthy laptops with kill switches out there.
I have an X1 Carbon Gen 9 with a high DPI 16:10 display, 32GB RAM, and anywhere from 4 to 12 hours of battery depending on workload. It's worth a look for people who can tolerate Lenovo's history (BIOS rootkits targeting Windows in the non-ThinkPad lines).
- They lie about specifications like battery life (and other things). I get about 1 hour on my ~5 hour battery life when web browsing.
- My laptop had a race condition at boot that would prevent boot 50% of the time. There was a workaround.
- Wifi had a range of maybe ten feet (not joking).
I am sure there new laptop is better however I do not really trust them after my interactions. Especially for something more novel like a linux phone.
On the other hand, Pine64 is very focused on their hardware stack. All their products are running a very similar hardware unlike Purism. They are moving way more product then Purism and are better liked. Hence they have a stronger community. They are also much cheaper phone-wise for a similar feature set. And you can actually buy and receive the phone.
In terms of alternatives I think System76 is pretty good desktop wise right now. Laptop are alright. Waiting for their upcoming in-house laptop.