Hands-On: MNT Reforms the Laptop | Hacker News Reader

Hands-On: MNT Reforms the Laptop

hackaday.com

I love the slightly non-conventional keyboard of this machine. Thumbs can definitely be more helpful for typing than pinkies (alone).

What I wish for is an ability to put a fully custom keyboard there, e.g. two slightly slanted ortholinear with bent thumb clusters, a la Kyria and similar. A machine like this is likely a pretty good testbed for such development.

the olkb guy (planck, preonic...) announced on the mnt discourse that they're working together with @mntmn for an ortholinear mod. but as sibling says, the schematics are open, nothing stopping you :)

All of the specs are completely open so you can design one yourself. Maybe in the style of the 701C butterfly keyboard?

The best part is how each of the 18650 cells are swappable & not one soldered pack. This is something which could have been more widespread across devices like headphones, portable speakers & in slim laptops towards the hinge.

I could have sworn Purism's Librem 5 stuck to 3Gb of RAM because the system-on-module didn't support more. But the MNT Reform uses the same chip, and has 4Gb RAM.

The keyboard is terrible with no spaces between Esc, inside and below Fx, and around arrow keys.

This is the future of computing. The course charted by Apple, Dell, and HP is unsustainable.

I'm curious what you believe makes it unsustainable. Could you expand a bit?

Just seems like closed source, non-E2EE platforms seem to inevitably reach an end where open source and E2EE win.

Dell seems to support Liux pretty well.

They should add coreboot support, though.

Dell puts up with Linux. It's a side project at best.

System76 and Purism are some of the few Linux-first vendors out there.

I like the concept, but most people don’t want heavy, thick laptops because they’re not very portable. I imagine most people would be happy to have a more sustainable laptop, but it’s not a reason for a non-tech-savvy person to get one. That leaves this to a pretty niche audience, so I don’t agree that it’s the future unfortunately.

Plus, Apple’s strategy is very sustainable from a business point of view. And in capitalism, that’s all that matters, unfortunately :/ But I like the idealism of laptops like this and framework, so I hope to get one in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com