Good morning!
I wanted to thank everyone involved at mntre (esp Plom) for getting me my order on time. I’m about to go (tomorrow) on a family trip to celebrate my daughter’s Med school graduation, and since we’re traveling light, this Pocket Reform was very much needed.
So, since I have so very little time left before leaving, I just wanted to make sure I don’t mess up the initial setup. I’m very familiar with UNIX, esp FreeBSD, but have just a little experience with Linux (mostly SuSE/ OpenSuSE). This will be my first time using and setting up Debian.
So my questions (after doing some research):
- After initial config (with GNOME), I assume the first steps should be to run, as root:
apt update
apt upgrade
Correct? No need to do anything with the firmware? Is this step really necessary? - Then, since the Pocket came with an nVME SSD, I should run, also as root:
reform-setup-encrypted-disk – or maybe this step should be performed before (1) ? - Then install a (real) editor, ie EMACS

- I’m more familiar with KDE/Plasma than with gnome, although don’t mind giving gnome a try. Would it be too risky (since I’m about to travel) to install Plasma?
- I love the Debian concept of metapackages. So if I wanted to install Plasma, I would just need to
apt installkde-full
Correct? - If I wanted to do a little C/C++ programming on the Pocket, the right metapackage is
apt build-essential
This will install gcc correct? So if I wanted clang, that would be a separate install? I already found the Lisp and the Julia I also use. - The default fs on Debian appears to be ext4. I assume that given the hardware constraints of such a small platform, it would completely ridiculous to even try some other fs (ie, ZFS or even XFS)? Just want confirmation.
Thanks for reading, and sorry for taking your time with such basic questions! Any comments are more than welcome.