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There was an initial crowdfunding period first which we have almost completely fulfilled now (working on the last shipment of 68 devices atm). The devices you are buying now are from Crowd Supply's stock which we will start fulfilling to them in around 2 weeks.
The US price starts at $999, but you get hit with VAT when ordering from Europe. The VAT situation will be a bit different once we can offer these in our own (EU based) shop in a few weeks.
Keep in mind we're hand assembling these in Berlin, Germany, and the first batch size was below 1000 units.
I did something similar in 2022, also with LiteX, but not self-hosting because it used a Kintex-7 FPGA which at least at the time required Vivado for the actual place-and-route. It did result in a open gateware laptop running Linux and Xorg, though (thanks to Linux-on-LiteX-VexRiscV): https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-09-29-rkx7-showcase.h...
This is not true, the panthor driver (previously pancsf) for mesa is actively being developed and funded, and already works quite well (I had a demo desktop running on prototye MNT Reform Next laptop at 37c3).
I've made 2 laptops in KiCAD:
Thank you very much!
I feel you. High performance (for gaming, x64 emulation, stuff like Blender) is our next big topic. First, we wanted to establish a good foundation.
Edit: clarification of "performance"
Simple: we are a tiny company and make this in little quantities, end-assembled in Berlin, Germany. The BOM is >$500 and we have to pay platform fees as well.
Thanks for the feedback! If our campaign succeeds, we'll follow up with next-gen processor modules. After all, CPU/GPU/RAM is on an exchangeable module.
Ha, I've seen that! Really cool project!
The default part will be XC7K160T-FFG676, AFAIK it has some pin compatible family members as well.
Yes, the CPU/GPU (SoC) and RAM are together on a SODIMM-200-shaped module.
Keep in mind this is boutique hardware with very low volume, the device has a mechanical keyboard, and the case is milled and anodized aluminum. We are 3 people in the shop plus a network of freelancers. But unlike Apple, we can make open hardware and happily give you full control over the device, and you can communicate directly with us. This is a totally different scenario.
The CPU/RAM module is not the price defining aspect here, and we're ready for faster chips when they come out. The idea is you can upgrade for a fraction of the price of buying a new device.
In the browser yes. I have not tried the desktop app because I prefer web apps for proprietary services.
Just to give some perspective, JS applications I'm using on a daily basis on MNT Reform:
- GitLab
- Mattermost
- Telegram Web
- Glowing Bear
- CodiMD
- Discourse
- Mastodon
- (Discord, not daily)
- Youtube
- Youtube Music
I also use the KeepassCX and uBlock Origin extensions.
All of these work absolutely fine.
Sure, but that will still take a while.
One thing that doesn't come up here yet: our partners RBZ have developed an open hardware alternative SOM for MNT Reform based on NXP LS1028A with 2 Cortex-A72 cores and 8 or 16GB RAM. This is currently in the first bringup phase, but sources are already released:
https://source.mnt.re/reform/mnt-reform-layerscape-ls1028a-s...
I'm also personally working on a Kintex-7 (FPGA) SOM. This will allow us and others to implement RISC-V or other architectures, incl. retrocomputers and carry them around in a laptop form factor.
Hi, we offer MNT Reform with a custom glass trackpad as well! You can even swap the trackpad and trackball modules, and we offer them separately if you want to try another one later:
Hi, mainline support is good in general, but we do have a few patches that are still being mainlined:
https://source.mnt.re/reform/reform-system-image/-/tree/main...
As we use (in the default, pluggable SOM at least) the same SoC as Librem 5, there are synergies to have good mainline support.
Shameless plug: We're doing this with the MNT Reform laptop: https://mntre.com/reform2/handbook/schematics.html
There's also a print version of this book that is included with the assembled version of the device: https://shop.mntmn.com/products/mnt-reform-operator-handbook
The MNT Reform motherboard has 6 layers, which I consider a small number. Also, I was thinking about adopting MXM for a GPU slot.
I am thinking to adopt a SOM standard like Qseven or COMExpress etc. in the (a bit more far) future. What do you think about that? SBCs are not really a good fit for laptops in my opinion because you have to adapt everything with individual cables that are meant for external use. And: are there any SBCs you would like to use except for the Raspberry Pi?
Hi, I'm the project lead of MNT Reform, an open hardware laptop that just started shipping (link: https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform)!
We would be interested in an e-Ink experiment. During the initial prototyping this was one of the options we considered, but back then it would have been prohibitively expensive and we decided to focus on an IPS display and to get to ship a viable product as quickly as possible -- with a tiny team.
Adapting an e-Ink display to MNT Reform would mostly be about designing/adapting the screen housing and introducing a signal path to an e-Ink driver: options could be MIPI-DSI, eDP, USB, or SPI, for example.
Edit: My email is lukas@mntre.com if you want to get in touch directly. We also have a community over here: https://community.mnt.re/
btw the original twtxt is https://github.com/buckket/twtxt
Nice inspirations, thank you!
Mind to share some good pasta sauce ideas?
Thanks for the feedback!
Points for creativity, but in my opinion this borders on rule-lawyering with not much benefit. The code that tells the ARM/M4 to load stuff from that SPI flash can be easily changed, it's in the bootloader, so it can change that code before putting it into the DDRC.
Chromium tends to be a bit faster rendering wise, but there’s a new fix for etnaviv which allows smooth layer compositing in FF now as well. Javascript heavy apps and WebGL are faster in Chromium for me.
I don’t have any reddit experience to speak of.
But for example, mastodon is much faster than twitter, even if they have very similar functionality.
In our case, I didn’t kick off the process because I would have to send a free laptop to the FSF and we can’t afford that yet. Maybe later.
Also I’m not sure what the stance of RYF is regarding controller (non-CPU) firmware, as iMX8M needs a blob _in_ the DDR4 controller PHY.
From my dogfooding experience, it really depends on what you need to run and what compromises you are willing to make.
The biggest slowdowns I see with javascript-heavy web applications. Native applications like LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, Ardour are fine, and so is working in terminals or with standard GTK3 apps. I also managed to patch KiCAD and etnaviv into working together to allow for GPU accelerated canvas.
"Normal" websites and PDFs are fine and scrolling is smooth in chromium. With VLC I can watch full HD H.264 movies, software decoded, and YouTube is fine too, if you can tolerate a bit longer loading times than on a faster Intel/AMD computer. There's open source driver support for H.264 video decoding, but the userland infrastructure for it is not yet in common applications.
I have to say I'm using the sway compositor, which is a clone of i3 for wayland. It's more resource efficient compared to a full blown DE like GNOME 3.
For Emacs, I use the new gccemacs branch with precompiled elisp which gives a nice speed boost.
What doesn't work: - Applications that need OpenCL - Applications that need Desktop OpenGL 3+ (currently, etnaviv does desktop OpenGL 2.1 and GLES 2.0). That means you're stuck with Blender 2.79b, for example.
Regardings the SOMs: I don't wanna tell too much yet, but we are working on several upgrades/sidegrades.