Collabora Productivity got into the desktop editor market last year when they launched Collabora Office, an office suite built on the same rendering mechanism as Collabora Online, but focused on offline use.
They came up with this so people could get the same editing experience online or offline without needing to re-learn their way around the interface. It is still LibreOffice code under the hood, but instead of the traditional VCL interface, it uses a JavaScript, CSS, WebGL, and Canvas stack.
That shared codebase means updates move fast between Collabora's products, which is why the first major update for Collabora Office already pulls in features from CODE 26.04.
A refined document suite
Illustration sourced from Collabora Productivity.
Open any one of the three editors without a document loaded, and you will land on the new start screen. It will show your recent documents with file type icons, a template gallery, and provide quick access features like AI and document signing once a file's open.
Of course the bigger addition here is AI. I know you are tired of seeing every other open source office suite dipping themselves in Clanker paint, but fret not, as Collabora has kept AI off by default.
Switching it on means picking your own model provider, self-hosting a model, or choosing a vendor you already trust, and plugging in your own credentials. Collabora stays out of the loop entirely and the assistant gets no access to your documents unless you hand it over yourself.
When enabled, it drafts and rewrites text in Writer, sorts out broken formulas in Calc before you go hunting for the error yourself, and turns rough notes into an actual slide deck in Impress.
It can also generate images and summarize documents when you don't have time to go through them manually.
For the rest of the release, Office 26.04 ships what the CODE 26.04 release came with.
So for Writer, you get a reworked document comparison tool that color-codes insertions/deletions and any moved content while flagging who made each change and when.
All of that is viewable side by side or through the tracked changes panel. There's also a new multi-page view, richer style previews, Navigator search, and Markdown import/export.
Writer, Calc, and Impress.
Calc picked up just as much. Per-user sheet views let each person set their own filters and layout without touching anyone else's, and a new table design tab brings proper table styles along with calculated pivot fields.
Formula errors now show up in a floating helper dialog right on the cell, so you can inspect and fix the problem without scrolling through the sheet. A batch of new functions has also landed, including TEXTSPLIT, HSTACK, and WRAPROWS.
Over in Impress, follow-me presenting lets viewers scroll back through earlier slides on their own without ever jumping ahead of whoever's presenting. Similarly, slides can be grouped into sections, a single deck can mix multiple slide sizes, and multi-monitor support is better than before.
You also get better font embedding for presentations that render consistently wherever they're opened.
If you were looking out for enterprise support, Collabora says that they are working on it and that this release acts as a preview of what's to come. I asked Michael Meeks, the CEO of Collabora Productivity, what enterprise users, particularly those looking to deploy Collabora Office on Linux, can expect.
He said that:
Enterprises can start evaluating this today, support will arrive in a few weeks. They can look forward to smoother workflows, less training with a more attractive and ergonomic UX shared with Collabora Online, built-in AI support and more. We look forward to enterprise user feedback.
I recently had a very interesting conversation with a reader who suggested that I should not ignore AI. Because this is the next new normal and we have to adapt.
I agree but in the context of local AI. Local AI is the popular term used for the open source models that live on your system, stay offline and don't send data anywhere.
Sure, it's not for everyone and not every one would be interested in AI, irrespective of whether it is open source or not.
And that's why I am creating a separate newsletter called "Local AI Weekly" for people who are interested in learning and using the local (open source) AI.
FOSS Weekly will have the usual Linux and open source material that you love. No changes on that end. If you don't like AI, nothing changes for you.
📰 Linux and open source news that matter
David Plummer, the ex-Microsoft engineer who built the original Windows Task Manager, has had enough of what Notepad has become, his response is TinyRetroPad, a fully functional Notepad clone built in x86 assembly that comes in around 2.5KB.
Proton's Lumo 2.0 fills the gaps that made the original feel half-baked.
Memory is in; web search now actually searches, returning cited results instead of falling back on training data; and image generation is finally possible.
If you're not a developer or bug hunter, Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 2 isn't really worth your time yet; the user-facing stuff (GNOME 51, voice typing) is still months out. But Canonical has done some backend work that should simplify image delivery.
The Wine 11.12 release is mostly housekeeping, with fixes for two gamepad bugs worth knowing about. Need for Speed: Most Wanted had a stuck Up input firing on its own, and Super Hexagon went deaf to keyboard and mouse once a controller was plugged in.
The Linux Foundation has launched Akrites, a body for open source vulnerability handling, with roughly 20 founding members, including Anthropic, AWS, Google, Microsoft, GitHub, Red Hat, and NVIDIA.
Additionally, they have also announced their intent to launch the Agent Name Service, an open DNS-based standard for verifying AI agent identities. Here, every agent gets a versioned name and certificate tied to standard domain verification, with every registration and change logged in a tamper-evident, publicly auditable record.
Nate Graham of KDE has announced a fairly basic Developer Mode for KDE Linux that is supposed to let developers jump into a session tailored for Plasma or distro-related work.
ONLYOFFICE is now 16 years old. I did not know that it was inexostence for so many years. ONLYOFFICE gained popularity in the last few years as an open source office suite that has good compatibility with MS Office documentation format. That solves a major pain point for people who rely heavily on docx and xlsx and other such document formats.
If someone you know just switched to Linux and is intimidated by the terminal, we have a course to point them to. These are ten short chapters, all hands-on, that will walk them through core file operations.
KDE's System Monitor is a lot more flexible than its default layout suggests. Join us as we guide you through building your own page from scratch, picking chart styles, and organizing everything neatly with rows, columns, and sections.
Purism's Linux-powered Librem 16 laptop starts at $2,899 for the base configuration and tops out at an absurd $11,944 if you max out every build-your-own option.
Why should you opt for It's FOSS Plus membership:
✅ Ad-free reading experience ✅ Badges in the comment section and forum ✅ Supporting creation of educational Linux materials ✅ Free Linux eBook
KDE Step is a physics simulation tool that turns abstract concepts like harmonic motion, orbital mechanics, and electrostatic equilibrium into something you can actually watch play out.
In KDE Plasma, go to Settings -> Default Applications -> File Associations.
Here, search for a file type of your choice; as an example, I chose an .svg image below.
Now, arrange the applications in order of your choosing. Like Gwenview, Inkscape, and GIMP, then apply the changes.
Now, in Dolphin file manager, you can double-left-click (first app in the list) to open the image in Gwenview, middle-click (second app in the list) to open in Inkscape, and Shift+middle-click (third app in the list) to open in GIMP.
You can do this for other file formats as well.
🎋 Fun in the FOSSverse
Some choices in this puzzle don't belong with the rest. Can you get them all?
The terminal can bite you if you go to it ill-prepared. 🙃
🗓️ Tech Trivia: IBM just announced the world's first sub-1nm chip. The transistors are only 0.7nm wide, called 7 angstroms, and the new "nanostack" design packs about 100 billion of them into a chip the size of a fingernail. IBM says that this is 70% more efficient than their previous 2nm chips.
🧑🤝🧑 From the Community: Pro FOSSer Mikael is wondering what everyone thinks of AUR. Seeing the recent fiasco surrounding it, this is a well-timed thread.
Lastly a question for those who read the entire newsletter properly. Would you be interested in a text-only version of FOSS Weekly?
Microsoft has spent the last few years stuffing Notepad with AI tools, Markdown support, and cloud-tied credits, chipping away at the simple, local text editor it used to be. Basic editing still works without signing in, but the AI features don't.
You need a Microsoft account just to check your remaining monthly AI credits.
That's a lot for an app whose only job used to be opening text files. 🤷
David Plummer (Dave), the ex-Microsoft engineer behind the original Windows Task Manager, just proved none of it was necessary. He has built TinyRetroPad, a fully working Notepad clone that fits in roughly 2.5KB.
Instead of writing a text editor from scratch, Dave just borrowed the one already sitting inside the operating system. This note-taking app works by wrapping RICHEDIT50W, a text-editing component that's been built into Windows for years.
It's built with MASM, an x86 assembler, then squeezed down further with Crinkler, a compressor made for tiny Windows executables. The generated output still carries a full Notepad-style menu bar, covering the familiar options like File, Edit, Format, View, and Help.
You also get useful tools like Find and Replace, Go To, a font picker, word wrap, a status bar, and working print support. Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, there's no telemetry plumbing in here that's calling back home.
Tracing its origin
TinyRetroPad did not appear out of thin air; Dave built it on top of Dave's Tiny Editor (DTE), a tiny editor made by another developer that uses the same barebones approach.
DTE, in turn, grew out of tiny.asm (also known as HelloAssembly), a project Dave wrote years earlier himself, extending someone else's take on his own idea.
The whole codebase, however small it might be, lives on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 License. Anyone can grab the code, poke at it, or shrink it down even further if they're feeling competitive.
Old news for Linux users
None of this is news if you use Linux. GNOME Text Editor ships as the default on GNOME, and Kate does the same on KDE. Neither needs an AI assistant or a cloud account to open a config file.
Geany and Sublime Text (not FOSS) have been staples of the Linux editing ecosystem for years, and Notepad Next exists specifically for people who wanted a Notepad++ alternative without going through Wine or an unofficial Snap package.
What Dave has done here is hand the Windows crowd a reminder Linux users have been living with for a long time. A text editor's only job is to edit text, and every feature bolted on afterward is mostly bloat.
There's no shortage of free backup tools on Linux. The problem is choosing which one to use.
The choice of backup tool depends on what you're actually doing. Someone backing up a home folder on a GNOME desktop has nothing in common (backup tool wise) with someone running five servers and a NAS.
In other words, different types of Linux users would have different need of a backup software.
Let me share you a variety of backup tools you can use in a variety of situations in Linux.
Back up tools for Linux users
At a glance, for our busy readers:
Tool
Best For
Backup Type
Cloud Support
Free Tier Limits
Déjà Dup
Linux desktop users (GNOME)
File-level (Restic backend)
Yes – Google Drive (via GUI)
None – fully free and open source
MSP360 Free Backup
Cross-platform users wanting cloud backup
File-level (Linux)
Yes – BYOS (S3, B2, Wasabi)
Personal use only, 5TB cap, no image backup on Linux
Kopia
Porfessionals and commercial use, off-site backup
File-level (snapshot-based)
Yes – BYOS (S3, B2, Azure, SFTP)
None – fully free and open source
BorgBackup
Linux servers, homelabs, terminal-native users
File-level (snapshot-based, dedup)
Local/SSH only – cloud needs extra tooling
None – fully free and open source
Restic
Developers, scripting, automation
File-level (snapshot-based)
Yes – BYOS (S3, B2, SFTP, and more)
None – fully free and open source
UrBackup
Multiple machines, small office fleets
File + image (mainly Windows clients)
No – local/network storage only
None – fully free, but requires server setup
Desktop Linux users running GNOME will get the smoothest experience from Déjà Dup. It's already in most GNOME-based distros and asks almost nothing of you. Connect it to Google or One drive or some network server for offsite backups.
Individual professionals and small teams need commercial-use licensing as much as features. Kopia is the strongest fit here. Open source, no restriction on business use. MSP360 Free covers the cloud-backup workflow well but is licensed for personal use only, so it's a better match for a side project than client data.
Sysadmins and homelabbers managing more than one servers should look at BorgBackup, Restic, or UrBackup. The choice really comes down to whether you want a CLI tool on each machine or one server watching all of them.
1. Déjà Dup: Best For Desktop Linux Users
Take Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, basically any GNOME-based distro, odds are Déjà Dup is sitting in your app menu. Just search for "Backups." in the GNOME Activity. Pick what to back up, pick where it goes, set a schedule. That's the whole process.
It moved to a Restic backend a while back, so under the hood you're getting all the goodness of Restic, proper incremental snapshots, not just a folder copy. And all this without ever opening a terminal, Restic is CLI after all.
You can choose to store the backup in Google Drive, OneDrive, local folder (but what's the point), network server (NAS) or use RClone to any cloud storage of your choice.
There is one thing you should note. Déjà Dup backs up what your user account can access. Your home folder, basically. It's not a system backup tool, and it won't help you recover a broken OS install. For protecting personal files on a single desktop, though, it's close to ideal. For system backups, try Timeshift.
✋
Non-FOSS Warning! MSP360 offers 5 TB of cloud storage for personal use. However, the backup tool is not open source.
2. MSP360 Free Backup: Best For Personal-Use Cloud Backup Option
MSP360 Free Backup is one of the few free tools that bring real cloud backup to Linux without asking for a subscription. On Linux, MSP360 is more of CLI-first tool. The free edition is described as a command-line tool that automates file-level backups and schedules through cron. And that puts it closer to how Restic or Borg operate. There's a GUI installer if you want it, but MSP360's documents point Linux users toward cron-based automation as the main path.
You get flexible choice for storing the backup files. Local storage, network shares, or your own cloud account through Backblaze B2, Wasabi, or any S3-compatible provider.
The free edition is capped at 5TB locally and 5TB in the cloud. Incremental backup support is included, and automation runs through cron rather than a built-in GUI scheduler.
The free tier is licensed for personal use and won't run on domain-joined machines (if you don't know what that is, don't worry). Some advanced security and management features, including centralized management, are reserved for paid editions.
If you want free cloud backup on Linux and don't mind a cron job standing in for a GUI scheduler, this could be worth a try. Kopia is the nearest comparison to MSP360.
3. Kopia: Open Source and Cloud-Ready
Kopia is an open source cross platform backup tool for Linux, Windows and macOS. This doesn't mean that it is strictly a GUI tool. KopiaUI sits on top of the CLI, and scheduling, deduplication, and end-to-end encryption all works from there.
On the storage side, it covers a lot of groundyou have all the standard options. S3-compatible buckets, Backblaze B2, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage, SFTP, WebDAV, plus the usual local and network drives. All of it runs through your own storage accounts. Kopia doesn't provide storage, just the backup tool.
There is some learning curve here. You'll need to understand repositories and policies first. Not difficult, exactly, but not plug-and-play either. And because Kopia has less of a track record than Restic, testing your restores before you depend on them is worth the extra ten minutes.
4. BorgBackup: The Terminal-Native Choice for Linux Servers
BorgBackup feels like it was built specifically for the hardcore sysadmins. SSH, cron, systemd timers, no GUI required unless you bolt one on separately like Vykar. It's a strong fit for home servers, NAS boxes, and homelab setups where a GUI is a secondary need.
Borg builds deduplication, compression, and authenticated encryption straight into how it stores data, so both storage costs and bandwidth stay down over the long run. The feature that I find awesome is that you can mount a Borg backup and poke around it like a normal filesystem, instead of pulling an entire archive just to grab one file.
Cloud object storage isn't native here. Borg expects local drives or SSH-accessible remote servers. Getting it to talk to S3 or Backblaze B2 usually means a hosted Borg-compatible service or extra tooling. If you're already comfortable with SSH and server management, none of that is a real obstacle.
5. Restic – Maximum Control, Minimum Hand-Holding
Restic asks for more from the user than anything else on this list, and gives back the most control in return. There's no GUI on Linux, no built-in scheduler. You bring your own cron job or systemd timer. What you get is a fast, snapshot-based backup tool where every run after the first only stores what changed, and every snapshot is independently restorable.
Encryption is handled automatically using a key derived from your password. Storage destination span local drives, SFTP servers, and S3-compatible storage, Backblaze B2, Azure, Google Cloud.
This is a tool for serious sysadmins and terminal junkies. If that's you, it's hard to find a more capable free option. If it's not, Kopia gets you most of the same capability with considerably less setup.
6. UrBackup: When You're Backing Up More Than One Machine
Every othre tool here is built around backing up one machine. UrBackup is what you could use when you manage a fleet of servers or computers. It's a central server with a web dashboard, pulling backups from all client machines you point it at, deduplicating across all of them to keep storage cost in check.
The process involves setting up a machine ((Linux, Windows, NAS etc) ) that runs the server and installing a lightweight client agent on every machine you want covered. After that, scheduling, monitoring, and restores all happen from the web interface, no need to log into each machine separately.
One thing worth noting is that UrBackup's image-based backup feature was built primarily for Windows clients. Newer versions do support extX and XFS image backup for Linux clients, but it's a less "battle-tested" path than the Windows side. That's why file-level backup is still the safer bet for Linux machines. Worth planning around if you're running a mixed fleet of Windows and Linux endpoints off one server.
Few Things to Keep in Mind
Backup type matter. True image-based, bootable disk backup, the kind EaseUS or Veeam offer on Windows, barely exists for free on Linux. Clonezilla is there but I can never make it work. Most tools in Linux do file-level, snapshot-based backup instead which is fast, space-efficient, but not a one-click bare-metal restore.
Automation varies more than you'd expect. Déjà Dup, Kopia, and UrBackup all include scheduling as part of the product experience. MSP360, Restic, and BorgBackup are the exceptions. They expect you to wire up cron or systemd timers yourself, which is standard practice for Linux users but worth knowing if you're coming from a Windows background where scheduling is baked into the GUI by default.
Multi-machine management is where UrBackup earns its place on this list. None of the other five tools here are built to backup a fleet of machines from one dashboard.
FAQs
Do you need GNOME to use Déjà Dup? No, but you'll get the smoothest experience there since it's designed around GNOME conventions. It runs on other desktop environments too, just without the same level of integration.
Isn't rsync good enough for backup? Rsync syncs files. It doesn't keep historical versions by default. Delete or corrupt a file, then sync, and now your "backup" has the corrupted version too. Restic, Kopia, and Borg all keep point-in-time snapshots for exactly this reason, so you can go back to before the mistake happened.
Can any of these handle a remote VPS or headless server? Yes. Restic and BorgBackup are both built around exactly that scenario, run entirely from the command line with no desktop required. UrBackup can also back up headless machines if you install just the client agent.
What's the real difference between free and open source here? MSP360 Free is a limited free tier of a commercial product personal use only, some features are reserved for paid plans. Déjà Dup, Kopia, Restic, Borg, and UrBackup are all open source, broader usage rights, no features locked behind a paywall.
Should you combine more than one of these backup tools? Yes. See what fits your need.
So, Which Backup Tool to Use on Linux?
If you just want the shortcut:
GNOME/Linux desktop, zero setup: Déjà Dup
Free cloud backup, don't mind a cron job or non-open source: MSP360
Want a GUI with open source: Kopia
Live in the terminal, want full control: Borg or Restic
Managing more than one machine: UrBackup
And let me end this with excellent advice on backups:
When Lumo (partner link) launched last year, I took it for a spin to see what Proton's foray into AI assistants looked like. I found out that the open source AI assistant ran quite well for a new launch.
And a few months later, Lumo 1.3 brought Projects to the assistant, letting me bundle related chats, files, and custom instructions into encrypted workspaces. I tried this out too, complete with Proton Drive integration for pulling files straight in, and it worked well.
Following that, I used Lumo to cook up some ideas for our socials, and it worked decently, though sometimes it would completely miss the mark. Also, its lack of ability to read images was something that didn't sit well with my workflow.
Fortunately, that's changing with the launch of Lumo 2.0, Proton's "most advanced AI assistant yet."
What's new with Lumo 2.0?
The feline-faced assistant didn't have real memory capabilities before this. It could save your chat history and group-related work into Projects, but it never actually remembered anything about you between separate conversations.
That is something every major AI chatbot on the market has already cracked. With Lumo 2.0, that changes, and you can now take advantage of user-controlled memory, which lets you configure what Lumo carries over from chats.
Then there's the web search feature that already existed earlier, but it leaned entirely on the model's own knowledge once you toggled it on. The Lumo 2.0 implementation pulls in live results with source citations instead, so answers about anything recent should actually hold up.
Another gap that has been plugged is the image support, with there now being the ability to analyze, edit, and generate images inside any encrypted Lumo conversation.
Proton also includes the Lite and Max models with this release. Andy Yen, Proton's CEO and founder, says the latter performs on par with the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic for many use cases, based on the company's own user testing.
I played around with it
For starters, I asked Lumo what version it was running, just to see if it had information on what its internal components consisted of. The earlier Lumo release had just done some guesswork, guiding me towards the support page for Lumo for getting further information.
But with 2.0, I was given an overview of the release, and during that, I also noticed the new AI model switcher that let me change between the Lite and Max models, as well as the thinking mode, with toggles for Fast and Thinking.
Next, I enabled memory through the settings panel. Before I could do that, Lumo laid out what it does. Showing that it can personalize chats based on saved preferences, stay out of project chats entirely, and store everything with zero-access encryption.
Once it was on, the panel showed an empty saved memories list, with options to generate entries from recent chats or add your own. I added one manually, telling Lumo I prefer facts over hallucinations and clarity over jargon.
To test the upgraded web search, I asked Lumo, "What is the hype behind Crypto?," a question that needs current information rather than whatever the model already knows.
Initially, it gave me a long summary of what I asked, but it was drawn from its training knowledge.
I asked Lumo again, this time with a slightly different prompt, "Why is crypto in hype right now?," and it visibly searched the web before answering. It then came back with a June 2026 breakdown covering Bitcoin's recent price drop, the political money flowing into crypto-friendly campaigns, and the DeFi narrative gaining traction.
To back all that, the sources panel sitting next to the answer cited reporting from authoritative outlets like Business Insider, Forbes, Seeking Alpha, and Politico.
For image generation, I uploaded the official Lumo 2.0 launch banner and asked it to convert the branding over to our branding, with a link to our homepage as reference.
Lumo worked through the request, pulled in the image, read through the It's FOSS homepage, our socials, and searched the web before generating a result.
The output swapped the purple cat mascot for a green penguin and shifted the color palette to match our branding. Though there was a slight niggle here.
Lumo's own summary claimed the text had been updated correctly to read "It's FOSS." It hadn't. The actual banner reads "It's FOCS," a typo Lumo never caught, even while running on Lumo 2.0 Max in Thinking mode.
AI assistants are known to fumble exactly this kind of detail, so I asked Lumo to fix the typo. A few prompts and a handful of slightly different image variations later, Lumo gave up, explained what the issue was, and asked me to add the text myself instead.
It then promptly slipped a typo into the supposedly text-free image it generated next. ☠️
Get started with Lumo
The 2.0 models are available right now, accessible via the official website. Without signing up, you get limited guest access to Lumo's core AI capabilities, while creating a free account unlocks more prompts and chat history.
If that still doesn't cover your use cases, then there are the Lumo for Business plans, which run on the same zero-access encrypted, Europe-based infrastructure. These include admin tools for managing team access and compliance support for regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.
Finally, the source code for Lumo's Android and iOS apps can be found on GitHub.
The Linux Foundation says that it intends to launch the Agent Name Service (ANS), an open standard that extends DNS to give AI agents a way to prove who they are.
In practice, that means being able to look up an agent and check who's actually operating it, what it's cleared to do, and whether anything in its code or history has changed.
Citing a research paper, the Linux Foundation says 82% of executives plan to adopt AI agents within the next one to three years, and most still have no reliable way to authenticate or govern them once they're running in production.
Right now, nothing stops an agent from claiming to be support-agent.acme.com as there is no way for anyone to check if that's true.
Finding the right one is just as hard. Nothing today links an agent's name and capabilities to a specific, verified version you can actually reach. ANS is built to address both problems at once.
How does it work?
Every agent registered under ANS gets a DNS-style name with a version number built in, something like ans://v1.0.0.my-agent.example.com. That name only comes with an identity certificate once the agent's domain passes the same DNS and ACME checks a website goes through to get an ordinary TLS certificate.
Every registration, renewal, or revocation gets recorded in a tamper-evident log (append-only Merkle log), so nobody can edit an agent's history after those events. A separate offline tool called ans-verify can check those records without even needing a live connection to the registry.
And before you assume this is something new they cooked up, it is not. GoDaddy already had ANS up and running months before the Linux Foundation got involved, building on an existing IETF draft.
Rather than build new certificate and DNS systems from the ground up, GoDaddy's engineers reused infrastructure they already had in production. That is the same certificate service handling over 100 million active SSL and TLS certificates, plus their existing DNS systems.
What's already live?
The agentnameservice organization on GitHub currently hosts eight repositories. The main one is ans, an MIT-licensed Go codebase that implements the whole stack, including the registry, the logging, and the verifier as a working reference anyone can run.
It's still early days, of course, but the whole stack reportedly comes up in around 60 seconds with nothing more than Go, openssl, curl, and jq installed.
Ever since successfully crowdfunding over $500k for the Librem 15, Purism has become a recognized hardware manufacturer catering to privacy and Linux enthusiasts.
The company is registered as a Social Purpose Corporation, dedicating its existence to upholding the privacy, security, and freedom of its users, even when that conflicts with maximizing shareholder profit.
That philosophy carries through their lineup of offerings like the Liberty Phone, the Librem series of phones, and Post Quantum Cryptography hardware.
Just recently, they announced the Librem 16 laptop, positioned as the direct successor to the Librem 15 and an upgrade over the Librem 14 in both performance and expandability.
📝 Librem 16: Key Specifications
At the heart of the Librem 16 sits a 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13620H, which is a 10-core, 16-threaded chip. Its performance cores turbo up to 4.9GHz, while the efficiency cores cap out at 3.6GHz. Sadly, there's no discrete GPU onboard, just Intel's integrated UHD Graphics handling display duties.
Memory tops out at 64GB, split across two DDR4 SO-DIMM slots. Storage comes from two M.2 bays that handle both NVMe and SATA drives, for a maximum of 16TB.
PureOS is the Linux distribution of choice here. It is Purism's own Debian-based distro that has endorsement from the Free Software Foundation, and there's no telemetry or advertisements involved.
Firmware leans in the same direction, with the Librem 16 featuring coreboot and a disabled Intel Management Engine. Then there are the two kill switches; one cuts the camera and mic, the other cuts wireless and Bluetooth; both can be flipped off manually.
The rest of the specs include:
Display: 16-inch, 1920x1200 (16:10 aspect ratio).
Ports: 2x USB-C (USB 3.2 Gen 2, DisplayPort Alt Mode, USB-PD up to 100W), 2x USB-A (USB 3.2 Gen 1), 1x HDMI 2.0, 1x memory card reader, and a 3.5mm combo audio jack.
Dimensions: 360 x 26 x 240mm (W x H x L), 1.8kg.
Connectivity: 1x Gigabit Ethernet over RJ45, Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6 with two antennas, and Bluetooth.
Battery: A single 3-cell, 54.2Wh pack rated at 11.55V and 4.7Ah
Get Yours
The Librem 16 is sold in three pre-configured tiers, plus a build-your-own option for anyone who wants to tailor the specs to their needs.
The Base model is the entry point at $2,899, with 16GB of RAM and 500GB of storage.
The Plus model bumps that to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage for $4,199.
The Max model with 64GB of RAM and 16TB of storage across two 8TB drives tops the range at $9,799.
If none of those fit, the build-your-own option starts at $2,870 and lets you configure memory, both storage slots, the wireless card, anti-interdiction service, and warranty length individually.
Push every option to its highest value, and the final tally lands at a whopping $11,944.
Anyhow, every configuration ships within 10 business days, with optional anti-interdiction service ($249) and an extended 3-year warranty ($399) available as add-ons.
Linux preloaded laptops have never been cheaper. And Purism has a privacy at hardware level angle so these laptops are not affordable by general public (like me).
