First of all, I would like to thank everyone for answering my questions.
I have been following the project since it started 4 years ago, and I have been comparing it with a lot of alternative, these questions are coming from years of thinking and following the project as well.
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Keyboard and keyboard and keyboard is the most important element for me. That’s why I would choose mnt reform over all other competitors, having a mechanical keyboard is way better than anything else. To give you an idea I take this to the extreme, on my desktop I have an IBM model m keyboard, so you can see to what level this is important to me.
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Open source, giving that there are alternatives, this is the only one that is designed in Europe, there is no other alternative exist today.
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Modularity, when I buy a laptop I used for 10 to 15 years at least, that’s the reason I expect the mnt reform to have a life time of 10 years and 10 years of support of new hardware, chips, motherboard, screen, you name it, which is an industry standard. This not the duration of what an average person uses their laptop. The last time I installed Arch Linux on my HP folio elite book was in 2013, and since then I didn’t change my configs (vim, DWM, etc…)
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RAM: the web is bloated, and I don’t like it, but all of you agree with me that we have to cope with it, therefore we need 16 GB of ram for Firefox only, and sometimes to compile C++ programs, especially that this device is an arm device, which mean I can compile software and move it to any other arm soc and it will work, no need to cross compile.
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I travel a lot for work, France ↔ Germany, and the idea of 5G on the device is really good when it costs me 10 euros per months to have 150GB in France and 35 GB in Germany, I will not need to use WiFi anymore.
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Finally also and I should say it, you guys know what are you doing. For example, choosing ath9k is a perfect choice for WiFi, because a lot of people do not know that, it is the only open source chipset that exist today, even if it is dates 10 years ago. I worked with this chipset and I can say it is one of the most powerful because it allows you to do what ever you want. I know that ath10k is open source but it is nothing compared to what ath9k is. We can assume that atheros was doing the right job at some point. Also I believe you deserve some credit, because a laptop is an infrastructure and when it comes to infrastructure like telecoms, people would only complain when it does not work and would never says great job, because we assume that it should be working all the time.
Finally, I understand the arguments related to " if I don’t need power, get the NXP device", it has enough ram, but it is way overpriced for what it can do, I know it is designed in Europe, but unfortunately we already lost the SoC silicon game, not the microcontroller yet. So we will have to get broadcome or rockchip to get decent performance. Maybe this will change in 10 Yrs with RISC V but I still don’t see the development in Europe.
I am a software person and still contributing to a lot of open source software, I never designed any hardware, and unfortunately I passed the time where I can learn, I am busy with so many stuff these days. I also understand the argument of open source, but keep in mind that open source software is free, and very few people have the ability to build hardware themselves.
PS, I know you guys are not on Twitter any more, but I don’t get your news from the mailing list or anywhere else and I am not going to create another account on mastodon. I know it is subjective decision, but I am Not here to argue about it.
PSS: @Lukas, I could have attended the event in Paris, but the time slot was too early for me, and if you were staying only 30 min it would have been hard to discuss all of these.
Let me know if this is make sense, and I know hardware is hard, that’s the reason there is the word hard in it.
