- First, I don’t mean any slight on Purism. At all. This is meant as an honest review.
Physically the Librem 13v3 is a bit bigger than a 13 inch MacBook Air. A little thicker but nothing significant. It does need two hands to open it though.
The trackpad, while good is unreliable. I found myself frequently trying to select text in a terminal and the cursor would not move with the trackpad held down by my thumb.
The keyboard. Firstly the key that does both | and \ is mapped incorrectly in hardware. This requires a systemd patch in PureOS. Also I frequently found keys didn’t register when I was typing.
The operating system. PureOS is basically Debian GNU/Linux. It seems mostly decent and obviously helps Purism ship patches for things like the keyboard. But it’s also buggy. I would frequently boot into a GNOME session with no UI elements. A lot of things like the functionality to suggest programs that aren’t installed never worked, there’s no working Bluetooth on the machine, as far as I can tell the headphone jack doesn’t accept a 3.5mm headset.
The load on the machine at basically idle was high. If I had more than a browser with a couple tabs open it was over 2.00 constantly. The WiFi and camera switches are neat but the indicator lights didn’t match the switch status. The whole experience generally felt worse than the experience I had with my previous ThinkPad (T400s) and that had the worst trackpad I’ve ever dealt with.
I’m going to try another Dell XPS.