Anthony Martinez @ajmartinez@librem.one

Somehow, despite many years of international travel and expat assignments, I never noticed that indeed everyone else’s periodic tables do say Aluminium. It’s we Americans doing it wrong, and the hard line I drew in the sand about this manipulation of the name of an ELEMENT was based on a web of lies. This may be as close to an existential crisis as I ever get. I am shook.

First impressions of my new Librem 14 from @purism. In just before I take a vacation inside my vacation!

https://ajmartinez.com/tech/posts/202119-001-librem14

More to follow in a few weeks once I've had more time on the machine.

@purism even running Qubes OS it's pretty good. I'll be running some tests in a week and share my findings related to "normal" and "heavy" workloads on mine.

@kyle actually default is now unencrypted boot with encrypted root on an lvm thin provisioned volume. That was the only option that worked. Going manual to do away with the unwanted swap broke it every single time, and I don’t care to waste any more of my vacation messing with it. When I get back to NL with a gigabit pipe I may try again, since restoring from backups is super fast now.

Ran into some trouble with my initial Qubes install on the Librem 14, as apparently changing any options in the disk partitioning unchecks the encryption box and renders it uncheckable. This is clearly a Qubes problem, and not a Purism problem, but it led me down a fun path of reinstalling a dozen times or so. That said, now I’m very well acquainted with PureBoot, my TPM, and my Librem Key.

I’ll work on A Rust Site Engine a bit on the Librem 14 today and see how I like it for Rust development.

@kyle being remote hasn’t stopped me from helping junior staff, or celebrating major events and accomplishments. This sounds like it comes from a narrow point of view that can’t understand the ways the culture credited with building their foundation probably actually slowed their growth. Unless I’m back doing mechanical design where I need to be on site with machining and fabrication to avoid scrapping million dollar pieces of steel I don’t need to be in the office.

@leimon my order was one of the first, or so I was told. My Qubes installation journey wasn’t the smoothest process, and I’ve not worked out exactly why yet, but once I got past that hurdle I was pretty pleased with everything but the keyboard. Most of my use is on a desk with my Drop ALT. I left that behind for my vacation and don’t intend to use the machine much until June, so maybe you’ll have your own impressions by the time I write up mine!

Finally got my new Librem 14 with PureBoot setup with Qubes 4.0.4, and restored my qubes from backup. Going from an i5-6300U to an i7-10710U has been great!

@stevenroose Thinkpad keyboards lead the pack. I do like my T460s KB. The X390 is notably worse. They’ve been in steady decline since X200. I’ve used worse than the one in the Librem 14, and I will surely adapt as I always have. In any case, I mostly dock my machine and use a mechanical so it won’t annoy me often.

Got my first vaccine today courtesy of VA Medical. Shockingly efficient process. Not what I’m used to from VA Med.

@stevenroose everything fits together right. It feels nice. I hate the keyboard, but I expect to hate laptop keyboards as that’s now an industry standard. There’s probably some secret international governance body that prohibits the design or sale of a laptop keyboard that doesn’t suck.

Not winning the jetlag game this time around.

Well at least the tacos were good.

Got my hands on my @purism Librem 14 shortly after I got back to the US. Then I went out for tacos while Qubes downloads. Internet here is so slow. And expensive.

@doenietzomoeilijk I am trying to stay awake

@doenietzomoeilijk they lost their minds and now they’re sleeping

@doenietzomoeilijk unfortunately driving from IAH to my house is about like driving from AMS to Breda so we’re on the way. There will be crying and barking. Possibly from both species 😂

Back in the US for a bit