Purism Librem 14 v1

Edit by @fsflover: This is a report for Qubes 4.0. For the latest version see below.


Remarks

I made a lengthy review and comparison post on the Purism forums here, and please keep in mind that I have only been using Qubes for a few years and am not an expert.

When I received my Librem 14, I verified that everything worked out of the box running the preinstalled OS (PureOS) on the preinstalled SSD. I then removed that SSD and installed my 1TB NVME SSD with Qubes 4.0 that I had been using on my Librem 13 for the past few years. I can confirm that everything worked without needing any additional configuration.

There is only one thing that did not work as intended, both on Qubes and on PureOS. I have it set to switch off the display when the laptop lid is closed, but the display does not actually switch off. This is solved by manually lowering the display brightness to zero using the keyboard key before closing the laptop lid and then manually raising the display brightness after opening the laptop lid.

So I would say that, Yes, Qubes worked out of the box on my Librem 14v1 without the need for any configuration.

Confirmed Working:

  • coreboot

  • Wifi (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks)

  • Ethernet

  • 3.5mm Headphone Jack (Output and Input) ← Correction

  • microSD Card Slot

  • All USB ports (data transfer)

  • USB-C port (power dilivery - only supported on the right side port by design)

  • WebCam and Indicator Light

  • Microphone (both internal microphones)

  • Killswitch for WebCam/Microphone (and indicator light)

  • Killswitch for Wifi/Bluetooth (Wifi/Bluetooth must be powered on while booting Qubes in order for the device to be recognized by Qubes, and it must be powered on in order for sys-net to startup with it attached. Removing the device from sys-net allows the device to be powered down by the killswitch and ethernet used in its place.)

Some more detail about the Wifi/Bluetooth killswitch when booting up Qubes:

The Wifi/Bluetooth device can be disabled by the killswitch during boot but must be enabled at two certain moments. After the Qubes grub menu disappears and the display goes black, there is a delay of a few seconds before the keyboard backlight turns off and then a shorter delay beore the Qubes luks decrypt screen appears. The Wifi/Bluetooth device must be enabled before the keyboard backlight turns off. Then the Wifi/Bluetooth device can be disabled again. After typing the correct Qubes luks decrypt password and hitting the “Enter” key, the Wifi/Bluetooth module must again be enabled for a few seconds until the Qubes luks decrypt process finishes and the user account login screen appears.

I do not know if this is actually useful information, but I was curious about this and decided to just play around and see if I could find when the device needed to be recognized. I was not expecting two separate moments though, so that was interesting.

This laptop is such a joy to use, especially with 64 GB of RAM and an NVME SSD.

Hopefully this is a good enough post for an HCL report here.

Attachments

Qubes-HCL-Purism-Librem_14-20210807-223750.yml (833 Bytes)

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