RE: Thoughs on the Purism Librem 13/Librem 15 laptops
Thanks for all the info in the article. Resteeming.
I had looked into purism laptops in the past but i was put off by the fact that i would have to pay 25% tax to import one in Norway. At that price point it is probably better to buy something else and upgrade/replace some of the propriety hardware.
Of course buying something ready made saves a lot of time but i am assuming that privacy focused linux users are also a bit of tinkerers.
If Norway ever drops that 25% import tax then i would probably reconsider but for know i'll stick to lenovo/thnkpads.
I share your frustration about the 'Microsoft Tax'. If only one could return or resell the unused windows license somehow that would be great.
Did you have a chance to actually use a purism laptop, hands on?
If so can you give some feedback on the noise levels? I had some high fan noise problems in the past when installing linux on non lenovo/thinkpad laptops even though they had an intel gpu and not Nvdia.
No, I haven't had any hands-on experience so far. I will update as soon as I get some. I don't think there were any excessive noise from the ThinkPenguin laptop, should eventually try to fix it (mechanical problem, should be possible to mend it somehow ... I do have both epoxy, duct tape, glass fibre and polyester i my tool box ...)
It's quite common in modern laptops that all the power saving (even adjusting the fan speed) is supposed to be done by the operating system, at the same time different laptops may require very different configuration - hence a laptop with a pre-installed operating system (pre-configured and tuned exactly for that laptop) may work out better than when doing some generic operating system installation in the aftermath. On some Linux distributions it's needed to install some power management package (like laptop-tools or tlp) in addition.
Now that "everything" runs in a browser, and even devices without a fan (such as mobile phones and Raspberries) have sufficient computing power to run browser applications, fan noise ought to be a problem of the past.