Interesting… I’ll have to dive into all that at some point. Thanks!

Oh right okay. Yeah now that you mention it. I do seem to recall watching somebody’s video booting the reform from the SD card. Well then, that’s even better: I can just backup the SD card and reinstall over anything I’m not happy with.

I’m totally unfamiliar with how these things boot. I’m not even sure it’s more or less standardized between various SoMs. But I suppose it’s possible to select which device to boot from at some point or other after power-up. So maybe what I’ll do is follow the manual just to familiarize myself with the machine as MNT Research intended, then install Ubuntu on a SD card and boot off of that, until I’m happy enough with it and replace the default stuff on the eMMC with it.

I’m curious: why do you need an I/O board with the Banana Pi CM4? Do you need a JTAG or SWD port that the add-on board provides to program the flash if the updater gets hosed or something like that?

Well I don’t know how MNT will configure the Reform. I presume they’ll load the OS entirely in the eMMC flash. So my plan is to dual boot it - either the default OS in eMMC or Ubuntu in the NVMe SSD. That way I can go back and forth and see what works best. Once my mind is made up, if I decide to install Ubuntu in eMMC, I’ll back it it, blow it, transfer Ubuntu onto it and mount the NVMe SSD as /home. If I decide Ubuntu sucks, I’ll just wipe the SSD and use it as /home immediately.

Well I’ll see how it goes. It can’t be anymore frustrating than my stupid HP laptop. Worst case, it is so unusable that I have to revert to the HP laptop. But I doubt it.

Re OS, I’m not installing Gentoo. This is 2024 and I value my time 🙂 As for Debian, I kind of intend to blow the partition and install Ubuntu 24.04 since I opted for the RK3588 module.

I expect stuff won’t work. That’s okay: it comes with the territory with a machine such as this one. If I just wanted something speedy that works reliably with Linux and satisfies my repairability requirements, I’d have picked a Framework laptop.

In fact I hesitated for quite some time, but in the end, I think the Reform will provide a lot more fun for a lot longer than a boring-ass it-just-works laptop. And the 18650 cells are a huge plus too: good luck finding another laptop with 18650s 🙂

I tried it. It’s unstable either way. Not to mention, I can’t really do Wayland because I have software I use all the time that rely on X.

The problem is the driver with the AMD Radeon Vega 6 chipset: it’s an older chipset and it’s not well supported by either the amdgpu or amdgpu pro drivers. I mean it works well enough most of the time, but every once in a while, it starts corrupting the display so bad I have to reboot. It usually happens when waking up from sleep or - strangly - when taking a screenshot with Flameshot (really weird that one).

I am reliably told that newer AMD stuff is better supported. That’s great. But AMD obviously doesn’t care about supporting the older Vega 6 chipset anymore, and I’m not exactly keen on debugging the open-source amdgpu driver to get better performances on a laptop that has other issues and that I can’t stand anyway.