Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

[Posted December 31, 2014 by ris]

Linux Journal looks at the Purism Project and the Purism Librem 15 laptop. "The Librem 15 uses the Trisquel distribution which wasn't a distribution I had heard of before now. Basically it's a Debian-based distribution that not only removes the non-free repository by default, but it has no repositories at all that provide non-free software. It was picked for the Librem 15 because it is on the list of official FSF-approved GNU/Linux distributions and since that laptop is aiming to get the FSF stamp of approval, that decision makes sense. Since it's a Debian-based distribution, the desktop environment and most of the available software shouldn't seem too different for anyone who has used a Debian-based distribution before. Of course, if you do want to use any proprietary software (like certain multimedia codecs or official Flash plugins) you will have to hunt for those on your own. Then again, the whole point of this laptop is to avoid any software like that."

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 0:44 UTC (Fri) by PaulWay (guest, #45600) [Link] (2 responses)

I wonder how these compare to the System76 and ZaReason high end laptops?

I'm specifically thinking of Purism's "freedom and privacy" table: both ZaReason and System76 offer machines with GNU/Linux installed, so they meet all the other criteria (kernel freed, OS freed, software freed etc.). Is the hardware as 'freed' on System76 and ZaReason's laptops?

Have fun,

Paul

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 2:51 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

>Is the hardware as 'freed' on System76 and ZaReason's laptops?

No.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 19:29 UTC (Fri) by IXRO (guest, #39871) [Link]

Wow, I actually think "competitive" is a good description for these laptops. It's such a nice surprise that I'm actually thinking of buying one. I wished they also offered a more extended warranty.

Purism indeed seems the "most free".

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 16:06 UTC (Fri) by alvieboy (guest, #51617) [Link] (12 responses)

Restricting access to software, either "free" or "proprietary", is a limitation of your freedom.

Users should be free to do whatever they want to their devices. If that includes installing proprietary software, dangerous software, so on, they should be free to do it. By restricting (i.e., making harder to) access it is not much different from phone vendors disallowing installation of third party software.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 16:30 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (4 responses)

Your statement in this comment leads me to believe that you think that software distributors should be obliged to distribute any piece of software that they can lawfully distribute, and to tell you where to lawfully obtain any piece of software they can't lawfully distribute.

After a few moment's reflection I find that position sufficiently unreasonable when applied to any software distributor who is not clearly exploiting a monopoly position that I choose to believe that I have interpreted your statements incorrectly, and I would therefore like to request clarification of your position.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 18:54 UTC (Fri) by alvieboy (guest, #51617) [Link] (3 responses)

What I believe is that you should let decision on whether to install or not install a piece of software to the user. I was not referring to legal aspects of software distribution. If you cannot distribute it, you must not do it. Note that this differs from your (as distributor) belief on whether the software is good or bad for the user. It's a matter of choice.

But, let's take a concrete example: J2SDK (Oracle's version).

This piece of software is essential for what I do (I have tried other JVM/JDK implementations, none was sufficient good enough for what I need from it). It's currently in "non-free" (the installer at least). Debian designed things well enough that I can replace the "free" JDK with the Oracle one, and my system runs OK.

By not allowing "non-free" repository, users won't easily be able to install this software. If you make it dificult for users to do that, you are indeed restricting the ability of doing so, therefore restricting the freedom to install whatever they can.

Microsoft did this with IE - you could still install other browsers, but you were given no choice on install nor easy way to do it, due to dependencies. And they were forced to allow that at the time (EU ruling if I recall well).

Summing it up: I don't think you are obligated to, but you should allow your users to do so. AND, note - this is based in Debian, which already has such repository.

Please let me know if I did not made myself clear.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 19:27 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

In a debian based distro it's easy to add additional repositories. The question is if the software in those repositories is going to be compatible with the libraries in the base system.

In this particular case, let the laptop manufacturer ship with their 'pure' debian based distro. If everything in it is upstream (which should be the case), then any other debian based distro should 'just work' on the same hardware. It's also pretty easy to migrate from one debian based distro to a newer version of a different one, just change /etc/apt/sources.list to point at the distro of your choice and upgrade. Odds are very good that this will 'just work' (and if not, you fall back to a normal install)

I don't buy a device to "be free", I buy a device to "get stuff done", but I will pay more to buy a device that I can load whatever I want on to it, without having to fight the manufacturer (although, probably not as much of a markup as this device has on it).

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 3, 2015 19:21 UTC (Sat) by alvieboy (guest, #51617) [Link] (1 responses)

@dlang: I fully support your ideas. That was basically what I was trying to express, but perhaps was not very successful at it.

But again, why would you "fork" a full distribuition just to remove a few repositories ? (I don't even recall if debian does have non-free enabled by default).

Looks like recently, whenever you dislike something (like systemd), you need to fork. Makes not much sense to me. Ubuntu did have a goal in forking, and was quite successful at it, but it ended up touching most of the distro, not just a few config files/apps.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 3, 2015 19:32 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

The FSF policies declare Debian "not really free" because they offer the option of getting non-free software too easily. So if you care about the FSF definition of "Free", you need to fork things.

Also, keep in mind that if you try to just offer a few different packages, but use the repository of the project you are forking, you can tun into trouble. I don't remember the details, but I remember that some minor distro got in GPL trouble because they didn't host the source for the packages, they pointed people at the parent distro.

so if you want to offer something different than what the parent distro offers, you really do need to setup your own build infrastructure, host your own packages, and you really are forking the entire distro.

(there's also the point that whenever anyone complained about anything, the response has been "if you don't like what the distro is doing, fork it, don't make a fuss", so people are starting to fork things like they have been told to)

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 16:51 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (2 responses)

> Restricting access to software, either "free" or "proprietary", is a limitation of your freedom.

And anti-slavery laws are a limit on my freedom to enslave or to decide to agree to be a slave.

FSF campaigns for the four concrete freedoms explained here: https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

There are hundreds or thousands of package repositories. How should one choose which ones to list? Well, if your goal is to give people the four freedoms, then it seems to make sense to list the repositories which contain software with the four freedoms. I don't see any flaw in that logic.

If the user wants to add other repositories, or install non-free software by any other means, they are free (unrestricted) to do so. That's their business.

Where's the problem?

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 18:59 UTC (Fri) by alvieboy (guest, #51617) [Link] (1 responses)

> And anti-slavery laws are a limit on my freedom to enslave or to decide to agree to be a slave.

You're exaggerating here.

> If the user wants to add other repositories, or install non-free software by any other means, they are free (unrestricted) to do so. That's their business.

> Where's the problem?

This is the problem: "Of course, if you do want to use any proprietary software (like certain multimedia codecs or official Flash plugins) you will have to hunt for those on your own.".

I may have (I confess) misread this sentence. For me, "to hunt" means I'll have quite a harsh time seeking the proper software, and installing it.

If one can still add the non-free Debian repo, and if everything works (I mean, if no dependency is broken in purpose), then I am OK with it.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 20:20 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

>I may have (I confess) misread this sentence. For me, "to hunt" means I'll have quite a harsh time seeking the proper software, and installing it.

You are reading too much into a couple of words. It just means you will have to find such sources yourself.

>If one can still add the non-free Debian repo, and if everything works (I mean, if no dependency is broken in purpose), then I am OK with it.

Nobody has deliberately broken anything here afaik. You should be to add anything you want to.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 18:18 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

Restricting access to software, either "free" or "proprietary", is a limitation of your freedom.

But they aren't really restricting access to non-free software; they are just refraining from providing access.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 20:11 UTC (Fri) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link]

> But they aren't really restricting access to non-free software; they are just refraining from providing access.

Not even that.
They just don't advertise non-free sofware.

But maybe alvieboy can point to the patch that these distributions apply on top of Debian's dpkg that makes it reject packages with a non-free license and the kernel patche that make dpkg the only process that can install executables.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 2, 2015 20:14 UTC (Fri) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (1 responses)

You can, even on this system. The FSF cannot prohibit you from doing whatever you want on your computer.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 3, 2015 1:06 UTC (Sat) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

They cannot and will not. The fsf is explicitly about user freedom, at the expense of developer and distributor freedom.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 3, 2015 19:49 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (8 responses)

The tagline says it'll "respect your freedom and privacy". That's a pretty tall order given that it includes an nvidia GPU and Intel chipset.

It's nice that they're trying to use coreboot, but they're still shipping an unknown blob with it. Here's an interesting read about how newer Intel boards have a secret (but not secure) hypervisor OS and CPU, always running in the background, whether you like it or not: http://recon.cx/2014/slides/Recon%202014%20Skochinsky.pdf

And will nouveau run fully (3D, video) on modern GPUs without closed-source firmware blobs? (If it does, I might have to rethink my next radeon upgrade...)

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 3, 2015 21:26 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (3 responses)

> Here's an interesting read about how newer Intel boards have a secret (but not secure) hypervisor OS and CPU, always running in the background, whether you like it or not

The chipset was chosen specifically because it doesn't implement AMT.

> And will nouveau run fully (3D, video) on modern GPUs without closed-source firmware blobs?

I think the very latest chipsets may need extracted firmware, but everything else is supported without firmware blobs.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 3, 2015 22:37 UTC (Sat) by PaXTeam (guest, #24616) [Link] (2 responses)

> The chipset was chosen specifically because it doesn't implement AMT.

http://puri.sm/posts/bios-freedom-status/ says otherwise:

> The Librem PCH X99 definitely uses it and the board will not boot without the blob.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 4, 2015 0:21 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

You're completely right, and that's disappointing - the discussions I'd had with them indicated that this wasn't going to be the case, and the previous spec list was HM86 based. I'll try to find out why that changed.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 5, 2015 2:50 UTC (Mon) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link]

They don't seem to offer any product featuring the X99 PCH, though. Certainly not that notebook; X99 is for bigger Haswell-E-based machines.

Maybe they just put the "Librem" part there by mistake?

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 4, 2015 11:21 UTC (Sun) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

Thanks for the link. That was very interesting and informative reading.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 5, 2015 17:34 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

Intel is shipping SPARC processors as part of some chipsets? Wow.

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 7, 2015 14:46 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

That was a fascinating bit of that slide deck. Intel Bay Trail chipsets come with SPARC cores!? I presume SPARCv8, I think there are freely licensed cores available which would suit Intel. Or they implemented their own - SPARCv8 ISA is free of licensing claims at least (AFAIK).

Purism Librem 15 (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 5, 2015 19:29 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> And will nouveau run fully (3D, video) on modern GPUs without closed-source firmware blobs?

I don't know about "modern", but my 2-year-old laptop is working fine ("GT216GLM [Quadro FX 880M]"). I also have a "GK106GL [Quadro K4000]" running 3 1080p monitors just fine with nouveau. 3D acceleration is there; no idea about "gaming" quality though since I don't use those for gaming.