Purism has launched the Librem 16, a privacy-focused Linux laptop with a 16-inch display and hardware controls designed to disable potentially intrusive components.

The machine runs Coreboot firmware and disables Intel's Management Engine. Founder and CEO Todd Weaver told The Register about doing this back in 2017. Purism also offers privacy-centric smartphones.

The new laptop has two hardware kill switches located in the strip between the keyboard and the screen hinge. One of them disconnects the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi controllers, and the other similarly neuters the webcam and microphone.

The spec is reasonable. It has an Intel Core i7-13620H CPU with ten cores – six performance cores and four efficiency ones – which can boost up to 4.9 GHz. You can customize the specification to taste, but the base model has 16 GB of DDR4 RAM and a single half-terabyte M.2 SSD. The machine also has four USB ports (two USB-C and two USB 3 Type-A), HDMI, Ethernet, a headphone jack, and a memory card slot.

It's available to order now for $2,899. It can handle up to 64 GB RAM and two M.2 SSDs, and the company has two pre-configured models: the Librem 16 Plus has 32 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD for $4,199, and the Librem 16 Max is maxed out with 64 GB of RAM and twin 8 TB SSDs for a hefty $9,799. All rely on the CPU's integrated GPU. There are some other options, though, including completely removing the wireless card, a special USB key that can verify the firmware hasn't been tampered with, extended warranties, and an optional anti-interdiction service.

This is not a cheap laptop, but then this is not a machine for anyone looking either for an absolutely top-end spec or for the best bang for the buck. There are plenty of other companies happy to help if that's what you want, and we've reported on some of them, such as Tuxedo Computers' Stellaris AMD Gen 4 and the Slimbook range. The It's FOSS portal has a whole list of vendors of Linux laptops.

By default, the machine comes with Purism's own distro, PureOS. This is one of the few Free Software Foundation-approved Linux distributions: it contains no proprietary code at all. The company has a page introducing it. You can download it for free and run it on your own hardware – although the chance of some components not working because of missing firmware is quite high.

Since even Debian began including non-free firmware with version 12, you may well find that if you install PureOS, things like Wi-Fi or the webcam may not work.

Speaking of Debian "Bookworm," the latest PureOS release is version 11, which was released in May. We took a quick look at the latest version in a VirtualBox VM. It uses kernel 6.1 and GNOME 43.9 – which is a clue that PureOS 11 is based on Debian 12, which shipped with these versions. A GNOME Wayland session is the default, although X11 is an option, as is GNOME Classic. Thanks to the Calamares installer, it's easy to install PureOS, although unusually, it uses full-disk encryption by default. It comes with Flatpak support preinstalled, but no Flatpak packages, and offers only the Purism Store to get more – which has a restricted selection of pure-FOSS apps.

PureOS looks great and it's easy to get it going, but it's limited by design and a little dated. It is extremely impressive that Purism's Librem phones run the same OS, though. PureOS is emblematic of Purism more broadly: these are products aimed at buyers for whom privacy, security, and strict Free Software principles matter more than price, convenience, or performance.

Purism's Librem 16 is available now. The company also offers a 14-inch laptop, a mini PC, a server, and an Atom-based tablet, the Librem 11. Alongside the Librem 5 phone, we also reported on Purism's LapDock docking station in 2023, which lets the phone act as a laptop. ®