Purism Librem 14 review (part 1): The ethical flagship
I do value the Purism goal of eradicating all the blobs from the hardware, but reading this I don&#x27;t feel any envy compared to my Framework which is almost a year old already.<p>I don&#x27;t have fixed standard ports, but I do have 4 full thunderbolt 4 ports, supporting power&#x2F;charging on all, and displayport on all, and the modules convert those into whatever combination of dongle-less ports I want. Even though I would like a dongleless ethernet and there is no module for that yet, I still feel like I have way better io than this because what I do have is configurable and way more powerful.<p>Framework&#x27;s special aim is more about hardware freedom and reusability&#x2F;repairability, but software freedom is a very close second and they are not exactly slouching on that job.<p>Of course the machine is fully supported under linux for all hardware, and beyond that, they have fwupd support in beta, and most impressively they open sourced the bios a few months ago.<p>Between the open source bios and the ability to install whatever wifi card and storage you want, and the ability to disable the management engine in the cpu yourself by a hack essentially, you get pretty close to eradicating all the blobs.<p>And it&#x27;s cheaper, even more repairable, and has better io (in a sense).<p>It has hardware camera &amp; mic kills but not hardware rf kill. The screen is 3:2.<p>I routinely run 2 portable external thunderbolt&#x2F;dp displays. Single usbc&#x2F;tb3 cable to each display, power and data.<p>I&#x27;m not a gamer but other people have used external gpus on it so the ports support that.<p>I also routinely use a tb3 dock on my desktop for gigabit and two monitors and power on a single cable.<p>The plugin modules also means that the usbc ports are also all essentially prophylactic. If you break a usbc port, all you really broke is a $9 passthrough module which you can replace in 2 seconds like swapping a thumb drive. You can even keep using the real usbc port while the replacement module ships, if you didn&#x27;t already have a spare.<p>64g removable ddr4, 2t removable nvme, 11th gen i9. I don&#x27;t suffer for power.<p>Battery life could be better. After tuning I get 6 or 7 hours. Not really up to par for today, although my machine is maxxed out in cpu, disk, and ram which is on me. There is a known issue that some of the plugin usbc modules draw power at all times even when not in use and even when the machine is powered off. So, I happen to use a thunderbolt dock on my desk, and my portable monitors are usbc, so I don&#x27;t happen to ever actually use the hdmi or dp modules I got, so I don&#x27;t happen to suffer that power drain because the usbc modules have no electronics.<p>I&#x27;d be interested in hearing more about the touchpad and keyboard. The Framework keyboard feels fine and is backlit, but I don&#x27;t love the layout. And I really don&#x27;t like the apple-style huge glass touchpad with no buttons. At least the pad is clickable so I can at least still disable taps. And at least it does work well when I must use it. Mostly I use an mx keys keyboard and mx anywhere 3 mouse.<p>I really like the keyboard and touchpad on my x1 carbon 5th gen (2017&#x2F;2018).