First of all, I want to make one thing clear: I’m not ranting and I’m not criticizing. I’m actually pleasantly convinced by this odd machine.
Don’t read any of what follow as a criticism, but rather a tongue-in-cheek account of my early experience with the Reform.
But before that, some screenshot porn, since the machine is finally all setup and I have my workflow more or less back to normal:
So, UPS dropped the laptop on my porch on Tuesday. It’s now Saturday morning and I can say it’s taken me 5 solid evenings of work to get the machine setup just right (i.e. that is, how I need it and I wanted: your mileage may vary). And bear in mind that I’m a Unix professional with 40 years of experience (a bit less with Linux of course) 
This is roughly how it went:
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I unpacked the laptop. It was nicely packed, the manual is super-nice with thick pages. Yes, I care about those things and I can tell quality when I see it. I didn’t need the manual but I ordered it on purpose to check whether it would be an afterthought, and it wasn’t. Someone actually cared to make it nice, and that’s worth mentioning in this age of mediocrity.
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I opened the laptop, plugged the USB-C power brick, powered it on: no problem. I was greeted with a screen to let me choose my environment. I’m an i3 guy so I chose Sway. Sway came up, no issue. It felt like home.
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After playing with the laptop disconnected from the wall wart some, I fell asleep and let the batteries die. The next morning, the laptop was bricked
I unscrewed the lid, disconnected the battery packs, connected the USB charger to bring up the keyboard controller, then reconnected the packs “live” to force some charge into them. The battery status looked weird but some amps were flowing in, so I figured it was charging… [Side note: you can tell the charge display was done by an engineer: when it’s charging, the amperage is a negative value. This would NEVER pass muster at a marketing department in a million years
]Long story short, after a few sketchy operations like that, it finally decided to behave and charge back up normally. Not great, but the show was back on the road.
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While in instantly loved the trackball, I also instantly hated the button mapping. So I decided to modify the firmware to remap the buttons. That went quickly and smoothly. Nice!
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As I played with the laptop some more, I noticed that the keyboard kept getting USB reset events for some reason. After asking here, I was informed that the firmware might have a bug. No matter: I git-cloned the latest version, rebuilt it and flashed it and… I bricked the laptop again.
I tried reflashing the LPC firmware. That didn’t do anything. Finally, I took a peek in the keyboard’s firmware and noticed a glaring mistake. So I cross-compiled it on my regular x86 HP laptop and reflashed the keyboard (which, incidentally, involves gutting a good bit of the laptop).
That unbricked the laptop! So the show was back on the road once again
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After some more time configuring the laptop, I noticed that my keyboard was bulging outward. Odd… After taking a look, I quickly noticed that the CPU module was too tall and the plexiglass bottom was pushing against the heatsink.
So I took a couple hours to model and 3D-print a spacer to create a bit more space for the module. That cured the problem. But lucky I have access to a big 3D printer that could handle that job! And lucky I have CAD skills also, I guess.
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Then I went about configuring my work environment. I needed to configure VPN access to my company’s intranet - which uses a Fortinet Fortigate. So I installed openfortivpn and copied my config files over from the HP laptop. And… I spent 8 hours debugging openfortivpn, which is incompatible with the latest pppd daemon
Is it the Reform’s fault? Of course not. It’s Debian Unstable. It’s, well, unstable. Still… here’s the thing: no VPN, no work laptop. So I absolutely needed to fix that piece of software.
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Then I tried to install PrusaSlicer, to generate gcode files for our 3D printers. It immediately complained that it needed OpenGL 3.2, and the Reform’s OpenGL only supports 3.1. Grrr…
After much searching, I found an ARM64 flatpak of OrcaSlider - which is a fork of PrusaSlicer - that works well. But now I have a new slicer to get used to, because the interface is rather different.
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At that point, the “big” software packages I needed were sorted out. So I started taking care of the small things - you know, things like the screen locker / screensaver, file manager, clipboard manager, language selector, emoji picker, screenshot utility… stuff you need and use all the time and never think about.
And sure enough, most of my i3 stuff doesn’t work in Wayland (i3 is X11). So I went hunting for Wayland replacements and configured Sway accordingly for many, many… many hours.
And now it’s done!
The Reform is like all computers: if you care about the environment you run and making your work tool your very own, it’ll never be ready to use out of the box like a Windows or Mac machine. I’ve never bought a computer that I didn’t spend ungodly amounts of time configuring.
But the Reform takes this paradigm to a whole new level!
As the old saying goes: the Reform is user-friendly - just very particular whom it makes friend with
All in all, I like it. Doing all those chores actually got me to use it rather intensely, so now that it’s all setup, it feels like an old pair of jeans. That’s good.
I don’t much like the speakers, which are wimpy at best, even at full volume. And I don’t much like that I can’t suspend or hibernate the machine, and I can’t just slam it shut in the evening and pick up where I left off the next morning. But I don’t watch movies on my laptop and I can spend another minute booting up once a day I guess, so all in all, it fits my workflow quite well.
But boy! was it a handful. And I have a feeling if I didn’t know my way around Linux intimately and how to compile stuff, I might be in a right ole pickle with that one right now.