MNT Reform 2 summary (after few weeks)
======================================
The good
The device is of unusually high build quality. The keyboard is
excellent. While keyboard layout includes has some strange things (the
"..." key left of the "A", the "Alt" keys in the middle of the spacebar
and the "Hyper" and the "Super" keys in place of the "Ctrl") the
keyboard itself is of excellent quality (the best laptop keyboard made
in last 10 years at minimum). The keys are backlit. While the backlight
is not perfect (the lover half of every key is much more dim than the
upper one) it is still very useful.
The trackball is nice and works well (I never felt in love with
touchpads so I am very happy to have a mechanical pointing device). An
even better model exists (with smoother ball movement thanks to metal
bearings) but I am happy enough with my older model.
The screen (12.5", 1920x1080) is very good (much better than I
expected).
The keyboard controller with its display is cool. I have to update its
firmware to made it more useful for me, however.
The CPU is fast enough. It is about 2 times slower than CPU in my GPD
Pocket 1 (when running my FEA code) but a lot of software is now
optimised to ARM CPUs so the actual speed of many programs is good here
(the Firefox feels fast here).
The Sway window manager is actually very good. I never thought I will
be happy with the Wayland (I am not now) but the Sway + the Waybar make
things to be feasible.
Some people say that it is not possible to have more keyboard layouts
in the Wayland but the setup below (~/.config/sway/config) works for me
without issues (layout are changed by pressing of both Shift keys):
Suspend does work just now but some problems are still here. When the
machine wakes then the screen is bank. This can be solved easily by
re-initialising of the display adapter. It is not ideal solution but
one which works (for now, at least). Thus my Sway config file
(~/.config/sway/config) includes this line:
Obviously, I have to press "Super+x" key combination to execute these
commands. But it can be easily done when the screen is blank.
Battery life is not good by today standards. It is an expected
trade-off for their replaceability (they are standard industrial cells)
and their little more environment-friendly nature (no cadmium). I can
get about 4-5 hours at max.
The power brick is quite massive. Some people find a barrel-to-USB-C
converter cable. I tried to get one of these reported to be working but
haven't find anything available to me ("we do not ship to you
address.." at best).
The ugly
The SSD died after four days. It seems I am not first so it seems that
a bad bach of disks was probably used for the MNT machines. So I
installed a bigger drive from an another manufacturer (the Seagate this
time).
My machine was lying unassembled for a long time somewhere in the U.S.
Its RTC battery (the CR1220) expired in meantime. So the machine
refused to accept the "hwclock" command and refused to keep the time. I
have had it replaced and now the things are OK.
