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Comment by oftenwrong | Hacker News Reader

I own one of these as my personal laptop. I pretty much agree with this review. Unless you care about more niche things like coreboot, there is nothing really special about the laptop. There is nothing really bad about it, either. It meets my practical needs, and I am happy to support the limited market of more-"free" hardware.

I have not tried to use PureOS. As soon as I received it, I tried to install Qubes OS, but I was not successful. I ended up installing Debian stable, which has been my OS of choice for many years. I have not had any hardware support issues so far on Debian.

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What had you hung up on Qubes?

I used it for some time on my librem and it worked well, but I generally needed better Windows in a VM support for work.

After the installation, it would not boot from the drive. I tried to reinstall, and it still didn't work. I wasn't in the mood to troubleshoot it, so I just gave up and installed Debian. It was likely I would have switched to Debian later on, anyway.

Would the touchpad be usable for precise design work (e.g. working with pen tools/bezier curves in vector programs)?

This review talks about using a Wacom tablet with it: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article341/review-purism-librem13...

I find the touch pad to be accurate and usable on Manjaro, but I only use it to move around the terminal, IDE, and VMs.

I am not sure. I almost never do anything graphical, and I mainly work from the keyboard.

Does highlighting text (click, dragging the cursor over text) work well? That's all it needs to do, point click, and be able to control the dragging.

In my experience frequently not. I couldn’t highlight text in terminals sometimes.

And the | key isn’t functional without a systemd patch.

I recently discovered debian offers netinstaller images with nonfree wifi firmwares included in the image. It still fits in an USB stick.

I installed it. Apart from the fact that windows bars and menu are still too big for low resolution, debian is so good, light and fast.

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