Bought the pocket reform, now what should I do?

Hi, I just bought the mnt reform since I love tinkering things(+the ortho keyboard). It says on the website that it is expected to ship in about 2 months, so I was wandering what could I do before I get the reform?

This is my first time using linux, and I don’t know a lot about the electronic parts, so I have some ‘fear of the unknown’ and want to prepare myself for it. I’d appreciate any tips.

Depending on what other devices you use, perhaps learn command line tools. The easiest way would be using a virtual machine either locally or using a cloud service.

The keyboard and trackball require no real learning in advance as they are self explanatory, unless you are particularly good at rote learning and can learn key combos prior to using the device.

I wouldn’t worry too much though, it is an easy setup process and with a day or two of effort you can get a pretty good working setup for whatever you plan to use it for.

Install Linux somewhere and try using it regularly. The Pocket Reform comes pre-installed with Debian so that’s probably the distribution you might want to try out.

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Thanks! I’ll try out debian in my other laptop. Can’t wait to use it

Last time I tried, Debian wasn’t the most beginner friendly to install. I’d recommend installing Linux mint on a laptop or VM as it is very easy to get up and going. Then check out William E Shotts’s free book The Linux Command Line

Linux Mint uses the same package manager as Debian, so if you learn to work in the Mint command line you’ll manage on Debian.

Debian now has a nice GUI installer, so this is largely unnecessary. You’re probably thinking of the TUI installer, which still exists as an option but is 100% optional. I’d reccomend setting up Debian, as it’s a truer reform experience and you won’t find yourself tripping over mintisms later.