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1. Embed this notice
   Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 13-Oct-2025 22:06:59 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

   • Sobex

   @Sobex It's not necessarily, I have been advocating MNT's stuff for a long time.

   But let me say that I think that if you *are* disappointed with Framework's actions then consider that MNT is:

   - An indie, queer open hardware shop based out of Berlin
   - All of their stuff really is as open hardware as they can make it
   - The community is just lovely

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 13-Oct-2025 22:08:17 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Sobex

     @Sobex The downsides for MNT, if you're looking for a drop-in replacement:

     - There's no current x86 offering, if that's important to you
     - You *will* have to hack it at some point probably, but it's highly hackable!
     - The MNT Reform Next isn't out yet, so either you have this incredibly cute pocket computer, or you have the chonker "brutalist" (but highly hackable) original MNT Reform

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   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 13-Oct-2025 22:15:37 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Sobex

     @Sobex There's one other big downside: power management really isn't very good on most of the modules *yet*. I think some of the older modules have suspend, but hibernate is kinda working on the RK3588, no suspend yet. I do think this is a big barrier to adoption for many people.

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Monday, 13-Oct-2025 22:37:01 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Sobex
     • Listentolist

     @listentolist @Sobex I haven't yet; running Guix on top of Debian when using it. There have been people working on it:
     https://community.mnt.re/t/guix-and-reform/173/44

     It could use more help though!

   • Embed this notice
     Listentolist (listentolist@norden.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Oct-2025 22:37:03 JST Listentolist

     in reply to

     • Sobex

     @cwebber @Sobex Have you tried running Guix System on one of the MNT laptops?

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Oct-2025 00:02:34 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     A lot of people are bringing up price as a downside. This is true insofar as there are certainly cheaper offerings on the market which are even more powerful in terms of specs, and with less fiddling required.

     So that doesn't sound like a big sell! This is for people who want to have something repairable, and want to help *get* the state of hardware to a better safe, to help invest in hardware for a future we can still control.

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Oct-2025 00:03:49 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     Overall, the MNT Pocket Reform is just over 1k EUR. Which is what many laptops go for. Certainly if you go looking for cheaper options, you will find them though.

     But it is an expense. And an even bigger expense from the MNT offerings: time, hack energy, and patience. This is the biggest thing I'd warn about: you have to be willing to fiddle with the thing and take part in the community. MNT's offerings are getting better and better, but we're still at early adopter period.

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Oct-2025 00:05:39 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     But with all that said, if there's *anywhere* that there's a market for a hack-it-yourself laptop that's highly configurable, it's the fediverse!

     And the original point of this thread wasn't "this is the best value for the price point". That's not an argument I'm making.

     The point I argued is that we *need* hackable hardware in order to keep participatory computing alive, and MNT's offerings are the best bet we have.

     And I fully, fully believe that much is true.

   • Embed this notice
     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Oct-2025 00:08:44 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to
     @cwebber Makes me wonder a bit what kind of fiddles but I'd expect the usual arm stuff, except it works on different systems (instead of being stuck on a monkey-patched Ubuntu), there's a community and can reach the machine's vendor ^^
   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Oct-2025 04:32:43 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • lucie lukas "minute" hartmann
     • NovaCustom
     • Bradley M. Kuhn

     @bkuhn I suspect @novacustom will resemble more of a laptop of today with less work, whereas @mntmn is a better eye to the future, but I don't know much about @novacustom

     If you can handle the chonk factor (which given you've run a lot of old thinkpads, you probably can), @mntmn's probably a better fit for your goals once the Reform Next comes out, but it's not there yet, and you might be disappointed with lack of suspend at current functionality

   • Embed this notice
     Bradley M. Kuhn (bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Oct-2025 04:32:45 JST Bradley M. Kuhn

     in reply to

     • lucie lukas "minute" hartmann
     • NovaCustom

     @cwebber Thanks for talking about this. Ironically, I was in a thread before this mess started choosing between @mntmn & #Framework:
     https://fedi.copyleft.org/@bkuhn/115288857091836217

     Folks have been mentioning @novacustom a lot, & some have said it may be fewer proprietary blobs than MNT Next will likely need.

     Do you have any thoughts on them?

     I just can't survive on these X200's & T500's anymore (despite having a big stack of them).

     & man will I miss track points😔

   • Embed this notice
     Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@social.coop)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Oct-2025 04:33:28 JST Christine Lemmer-Webber

     in reply to

     • Bradley M. Kuhn

     @bkuhn The other thing is, how attached are you to x86? I am guessing you would be fine running aarch64; I can't think of anything you do that's x86 specific.