I just got my Pocket Reform last night. I really love it already, customer for life. I really like it comes with Debian and has KiCAD files available. That is the deal clincher for me.
My eyes aren’t so great either. The screen is very crisp and clear. Very happy with that.
The keyboard layout is going to take awhile to get used to (I keep hitting HYPER
for CTRL
), but it feels good.
The trackball, which I haven’t used in forever, is also great. I have used Thinkpads in the past, and prefer this trackball over it. I also like this trackball more than touchpads.
I wish the ethernet was RJ45, but perhaps they didn’t have space. I don’t use wifi here, just ethernet. It would be nice to not have to carry a rare ethernet cable with it, when I have a bunch of RJ45 everywhere.
Also, for some reason more likely related to Debian sid and/or gnome-network, it wouldn’t take a DHCP address on ethernet. I added the address to the dhcpd server, saw the Pocket request an IP and get assigned it, but gnome network just would spin and spin and never use the IP. Running this would get an IP immediately:
dhclient end1
It would be nice if the openssh-server
was installed out-of-the-box to make it easier to get going. If zstd
was installed by default, it could be used instead of gzip
when building the kernel initrd when doing updates. Maybe consider also adding nvme-cli
, fdisk
, and lshw
by default, but no big deal.
I was surprised to see that non-free-firmware Debian repo was enabled. I’m not sure what blobs (if any) it is pulling from there.
The login screen says use F12
for power, but there is no F12
. According to the docs (p. 9), that maps to HYPER+w
, but that doesn’t work for me. The docs also say F10
is HYPER+10
, but they probably mean HYPER+0
.
This is probably unique to me, but I was trying to get openbox
installed. I was able to get it launched, but it was rotated 90 degrees. The mouse cursor also left a trail on the screen, so that’s not usable. I haven’t poked at it much yet.
I am charging it with a PinePower desktop power supply. It reads 19.9V and 1.5A when charging.