MNT Reform: second round of impressions
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I have update the OS and the suspend no longer works. It seems to be a
known problem (if I understand the matters there ware some changes in
Linux kernel broke something - but it is not known what exactly was
that something).
The keyboard is OK. I still have problems with these Alt keys located
in the middle of the spacebar and with the right Shift key (it's too
close to arrows and I often press the Up Arrow instead of the Shift).
Also the "..." key between the Ctrl and the A is crazy but the rest of
the layout seems to be nice.
The screen is gorgeous. The CPUs are of course slow (several times
slower than the POWER9 on my workstation) but many programs have been
optimised for the ARM CPUs so they are quite fast (the Firefox is one
of them - wlile it is slower than the POWER9 version is it is still
fast enough).
Well, the Wayland, the Gtk+ and the OpenGL. My program which uses the
Gtk+ 2.x and the OpenGL 1.x randomly fails. This would be a big deal on
the X11 (I would prefer no fails at all, anyway) but if freezes the
whole Wayland. I still have not found any reliable workaround.
I have managed to have the pilot-link tools here. I still ahve to try
to connect the USB-Serial adapter and try if communication with a Palm
actually works.
Still, it's a nice machine. It looks very strange these days (which is
a plus), the input devices are great (I like the trackball, too!) and
the screen is very good. Of course, many people will think that the
1920x1080 resolution is too low but on a 13" screen it looks excellent.
The OS is not bad (except the issues mentioned above).
Battery life is about 4-5 hours. It's not much (especially for a
machine with the ARM CPU) but acceptable for me (it is one of the
tradeoffs for user-replaceable and standardized batteries).
