Anthony J. Martinez

First Impressions - Librem 14

For my birthday last year, I ordered the Purism Librem 14 to serve in place of my aging Lenovo T460s. Slightly less than a year later I got my new laptop, and a few weeks after delivery I was able to fly home on vacation to finally get started using it. To most of my friends, waiting a year for a laptop to be delivered is utter madness, but for me there are almost no new laptops I am even willing to consider. Having a physical RJ45 jack is a hard requirement for me, and today it seems this typically requires a willingness to carry a "laptop" that weighs more than a healthy newborn human. Give me power, give robust networking options, and give me the RAM I need to run Qubes OS to its fullest. The Librem 14 offers this all, on paper, and over the coming month I will find out exactly how that all pans out in reality.

First Boot

My machine was ordered with the following specs:

Since there are not any good defaults for installing Qubes OS on an OEM device one needs to install it on their own. Knowing this I performed my first boot into Pure OS using encryption passphrases and user passwords no one should ever use on system they plan to actually use. The process for using PureBoot was pretty clear and straight forward, and the Librem Key that shipped with the Librem 14 flashed green a expected when I made my first boot. It also flashed red, as expected, when I booted the second time having updated the kernel.

My time in Pure OS was limited to two tasks:

  1. Generating new GnuPG keys to store on the Librem Key
  2. Making a USB boot drive from the latest Qubes OS release

The Next 20 Boots

My initial installation of Qube was mising one critical point: an encrypted root partition. Use of PureBoot requires an unencrypted /boot and that is fine given that I am notified of any changes and can opt to sign them if they were expected after an update. Lacking encryption of the rest of the disk is not an acceptable scenario for me, so I reinstalled. And reinstalled again. And again. And again.

Since I am writing this on vacation, I will have to come back to a determination of the root cause later. For now, just know that selecting the defaults in the Qube OS installer - which regrettably includes wasting 15GB of disk on swap I will never use - was the only partition scheme that resulted in an encrypted root partition. To be clear, I do not think this has anything to do with the Librem 14. When I do find the root cause, the appropriate project will get a detailed bug report. At any rate, once I was up and running the next task was restoring my qubes (VMs) from a backup taken on my T460s right before shutting it down last. This was done from a USB3 SSD, and the speed was outstanding. The restore completed much faster than the backup was made, likely owing to both faster USB controllers and the gap between Intel's i5-6300U and i7-10710U.

Normal Use

So far, I have not done much more than restore my qubes and fix a few remote issues I caused late last week that made SELinux angry. Everything is running smoothly, and the few times I have run a CPU intensive task like Rust compilation I have been very pleased with the performance of the machine. The only thing I do not like is the keyboard. I am far from the only person who regards older Thinkpad keyboards as being top of class, and coming from such a keyboard to this does not please me much. While typing this, my backspace key (and vim motions) have been flexed. My a, s, b, and l seem to particularly hate their existence. For some, this could be grounds for a return, but I have had other machines in the past with keyboards I found infuriating at first. Usually, the force of my typing tends to smooth things out in short order. If that is the case here all will be will. If not, it will probably also be fine since most of my use is on a desk plugged in to a Drop ALT.

Qubes and extended battery life are rarely thoughts one has concurrently, and I am pleased to note that the Librem 14 managed more than 4 hours on WiFi doing a mixed load of tasks. These included spawning at least 40 Disposable VMs, upgrading all of my Template VMs, compiling two different versions of the engine rendering and serving this page several times, and for reasons I still do not understand, playing the official music video for Enya's "Only Time" which I have not linked lest anyone else inexplicably end up with it stuck in their head.

So far so good. Tomorrow, I head for the mountains. When I return, I will put the Librem 14 through its paces as I work on some personal Rust projects.

For Next Time

I will try to: