You might recall that I was considering a MNT Reform laptop to replace my crappy HP laptop a few months ago.
Well, I got no answer or information of any kind anywhere (not just here on Lemmy), but the idea kept going round and round in the back of my head. And now, 5 months later, I find myself having to upgrade Mint to Wilma on my hateful HP laptop soon, and I already dread rebooting to the console because Xorg is dead again, having to downgrade to a working version of the kernel again, fighting the AMDGPU driver again, making the super-flaky and completely terrible wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek 8821CE adapter work halfway decently again…
I hate this laptop. In fact, I hate it so much that I finally pulled the trigger on the MNT Reform laptop. Hopefully it’ll get here before the need to upgrade becomes too pressing.
Stay tuned 🙂
Well I’ll see how it goes. It can’t be anymore frustrating than my stupid HP laptop. Worst case, it is so unusable that I have to revert to the HP laptop. But I doubt it.
Re OS, I’m not installing Gentoo. This is 2024 and I value my time 🙂 As for Debian, I kind of intend to blow the partition and install Ubuntu 24.04 since I opted for the RK3588 module.
I expect stuff won’t work. That’s okay: it comes with the territory with a machine such as this one. If I just wanted something speedy that works reliably with Linux and satisfies my repairability requirements, I’d have picked a Framework laptop.
In fact I hesitated for quite some time, but in the end, I think the Reform will provide a lot more fun for a lot longer than a boring-ass it-just-works laptop. And the 18650 cells are a huge plus too: good luck finding another laptop with 18650s 🙂
I am curious how much work it will be to modify that Ubuntu image to fully work on the Reform. The audio chip and some other peripherals are on the mainboard, and need to be included in the device tree for the kernel to pick them up, so I would expect that at least some modifications of the image are needed.
It might already be enough to grab the device tree from the MNT gitlab, compile it, and put it in the boot partition for stuff to work. (You will likely also want to install the reform-tools - either from their gitlab or from their repository. They include a kernel module that is needed to get battery readout and to power off the laptop on shutdown.)
What helped me a lot while setting up the system was that I kept the SD card with the official (Debian Unstable) image around - every time something didn’t work, I could boot it up and check how the official image does it.
Well I don’t know how MNT will configure the Reform. I presume they’ll load the OS entirely in the eMMC flash. So my plan is to dual boot it - either the default OS in eMMC or Ubuntu in the NVMe SSD. That way I can go back and forth and see what works best. Once my mind is made up, if I decide to install Ubuntu in eMMC, I’ll back it it, blow it, transfer Ubuntu onto it and mount the NVMe SSD as /home. If I decide Ubuntu sucks, I’ll just wipe the SSD and use it as /home immediately.
At least in my case, the default OS came on an SD Card, and both, the M.2 SSD (which I had ordered together with the laptop) and the eMMC were empty. The manual contains a section about moving the OS to eMMC, so I guess that’s their default setup.
(In my case there’s an additional thing though: For the Banana Pi CM4 SoM the installation of u-boot into eMMC is officially not supported, as one would need a CM4 I/O board to erase it again, if anything goes wrong. I installed it there anyhow, and it’s working for me, but I did buy the I/O board beforehand as a precaution.)