Pondering a MNT device of some sort. Questions

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  • Does widevine work?
  • How bad are the over heating issues on the pocket with the RK3588 processor?
  • AM I right that Debian Unstable is the only supported OS/image? I tend to be a Debian Stable fan. What is that like? Is KDE stable and useable ?
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I can only answer some of your questions as I neither own a Pocket Reform nor do I (yet) have the RK3588.

That is correct. If you want to use Debian stable, you can use the packages and system images from reform.debian.net but those are not supported by MNT and if you find issues, then it is up to the community (probably ends up being me) to fix them.

Can you ask a more specific question?

I have been running KDE Plasma on the classic Reform with imx8mq for a few weeks without issues.

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So typically Debian Unstable isn’t guarantied to not break, and large desktop environments have at times been in half broken states in Debian Unstable before. It seems like it could be something of a roller coaster ride if a major transition were to happen. I guess my concern is how stable the whole system seems to be in practice, and how much of a headache are upgrades due to the churn in unstable?

Are there any practical downsides to using the community stable branch if one is comfortable with that sort of thing? Is it missing any obvious hardware features compared to the official images?

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It is very much guaranteed to break. Have a look at the release critical bugs of packages that I upload to unstable to see how often the parts I maintain introduce a lot of breakage in unstable.

That depends how lucky you are. If you are not the first one to stumble over a bug, then apt-listbugs will prevent you from upgrading to a buggy version. Have a look at past issues that got reported to the forum.

Yes, it is nearly only me maintaining this and only very few are using it, so it’s more likely that things that I change introduce breakage which is not immediately found and fixed. More users mean that bugs get found faster. Fewer users mean that you are more likely to find the bug first.

Only on imx8mplus for the Pocket Reform for which the wifi firmware has not made it through NEW yet. Everywhere else, the kernel is the same one that MNT provides but built on Bookworm.

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How often are you seeing breakages in the Debian Stable? If I was pondering a MNT devices as my primary machine, and not really wanting to use Debian Unstable. Would you think one would find it daily driveable?

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I am not keeping a diary of each issue that I fix. I cannot quantify it. But I only have one computer (the Reform) and so far, the issues I found did not leave me with an unbootable system.

The MNT Reform is my only computer. Everything I do for Debian as well as for the MNT Reform I do on my Reform.

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