Purism Launches New Secure Librem 11 Tablet | Hacker News Reader

Purism Launches New Secure Librem 11 Tablet

puri.sm

23 pointsjdmark8 comments

>Processor. Intel N5100

Look. I'm a low end kinda guy. I still use a Unix workstation from 1994 as my home's NTP server.

But rendering a 2560×1600 viewport of any modern website with an N5100 and 8GB of RAM is going to be a miserable experience ESPECIALLY with the outdated (few updates in last two years) ideologically pure (no evil proprietary codecs) Debian/Gnome one-two punch they've got running on that thing.

What dumpster did they dive in to find N5100s? I had to check my calendar... It was slow part even at release (samples were out end of 2020) time. And software has not exactly shrunk since..

You can still find some N5100 2-in-1s for sale, but they're being cleared out for N100 replacements.

I have an N100 mini PC and it's better than I anticipated, but it's still obviously a budget part.

I get it, doing everything "right" means you can't do it cheaply. But an N5100 tablet with no keyboard? For $1,000? In Q4 2023?

Reminder that Purism cannot be trusted to actually ship hardware or issue refunds. You've been warned.

Even better: I sent back an unopened Librem5 because they said I’d get a refund. 10 months later and no refund after monthly emails, including cc’ing the executive team and their legal counsel. I’ll be filing FTC and state AG complaints when I get the time. Absolutely do not ever buy from them, they’re scam artists.

I think this won't be as successful as other Purism products, as there are plenty of alternatives that a privacy-minded user can buy, that don't cost Purism's inflated prices (e.g.: see Starlabs' new tablet). At least their phones were less finicky than the PinePhone.

In what way is this better (or more "secure") than a Pixel Tablet running GrapheneOS?

Free software wise, devices sold with Android usually come with proprietary userspace drivers.

And with a heavily patched, outdated kernel version not maintained for very long by the SoC manufacturer.

This is the case for a Pixel tablet running GrapheneOS.

There's an effort to develop an actually free distribution of Android to actual devices: Replicant [1]. But they have a hard time succeeding: they are stuck on an old version of Android (6) and run on very old hardware.

The only other way to run Android without non-free blobs and with an up-to-date kernel that I know of are:

- on regular (x86) PCs, with a build of android-x86 that does not contain the GApps (which actually means rebuilding it yourself, or finding a derivative that does this for you) - there are still the non-free firmware, but that's the same as regular Linux distros.

- same, but in a virtual machine (and you are freed from the non-free firmware blobs, to the best of my knowledge)

With Purism hardware, you can run a 100% free OS. This comes with the cost that we are seeing: old/limited and expensive hardware. Even then, I'm sure the CPU runs its own non-free microcode/firmware. I remember a blog post from Purism that explained to their users how to patch the microcode of their CPU vulnerable to the side channel attacks, since PureOS does not contain microcode updates, since they are non-free.

My comment might not seem too nice towards Purism, but I'm actually grateful they are trying and actually delivering things related to 100% free software and Linux mobile. I have a PinePhone, and it would not be as good / usable if it weren't for Purism. I think we need Linux mobile (or, at least, a free alternative to Android and iOS). It's not there yet for daily driving a phone for most people (even enthusiasts), but it's already useful and I hope it reaches this state at some point.

[1] https://replicant.us/

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