PureOS is just a Debian derivative (which attempts to get FSF approval like some other distros).
Purism has been talking up their work on a free firmware and disabled ME for two years now. They haven't gotten anything working until now.
I like what they're trying to do, and (roughly) how. I bought a Librem 13 and received it a year ago. But my overall impression is that they just didn't have the familiarity and expertise they needed on the software and firmware (and not enough money to buy enough expertise). Thus the slow and long-stalled progress on the coreboot port, the very slow and still somewhat disappointing development of the touchpad driver (which was the only driver they had to do real work on), and the confused/misinformed promises about the ME for the first year or so of the project.
But there isn't an alternative that's better in all dimensions, at the moment.
Isn't the 2015 Pixel laptop a good fit except for the limited storage ? I'm guessing that it supports coreboot out of the box, probably has all drivers upstreamed, and has a great display. If there were a way to upgrade the storage, that would be the ideal laptop. Also, Google might release a new Pixel laptop this year too.
You're right about everything except all drivers upstreamed. I don't know what is taking so long to get drivers upstreamed, but us samus users have our own patched kernel: https://github.com/Raphael/linux-samus.
That's pretty bad. I thought Google was good with this sort of stuff. Is the delay caused because they were closed drivers, and had to be reverse engineered ?
I ended up RMAing 3 different 2015 pixels. The g+ group was filled with hardware issues (possibly an echo chamber; how many happy users were posting in hardware problems threads?). I really wanted the pixel to be a medium screen size with an i7 and 16gb of RAM, but it didn't stand up to being a daily driver for me.
I can confirm that pixel does use coreboot and has a backup seabios (also open source) if you want to use that (ended up being slightly easier to run arch via seabios).
I'm pretty sure that both Pixel laptops run coreboot. This page says so: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f... .I think Google is one of the major contributors to coreboot. I hope they release a full fledged laptop with expandable storage.
Can confirm, 2015 pixel is a great relatively linux friendly linux laptop running coreboot. Until recently the sound driver wasn't in the upstream kernel, but it is in 4.9 (but still isn't perfect).
I don't know anything about PureOS and I've never seen coreboot in action, but this genuinely sounds like a selling point.
Intel HW without the dreaded ME would be super-nice.