2024-09-29 How do I feel about the MNT Pocket Reform?
=====================================================

SpaceLizard asked: What brought you to the MNT community? Well,
actually there were three questions:

1. How did you first find out about MNT Reform and/or what brought you
   here?

2. What do you do / want to do with your Reform Laptop most?

3. Are cats or dogs better, (or robots)?

Here's what I said:

I learned about MNT Reform on fedi. I had bought a Purism laptop in
2017 and I wasn’t happy. On a blog post in 2021 I mentioned the MNT
Reform laptop for the first time. I mentioned the MNT Pocket Reform in
2022, on a blog post from 2020.

I still use the Purism laptop as my main laptop, but one of its hinges
broke in 2021 and I needed something else to take on trips. That’s why
I started looking for an extra small laptop. I wanted something that
was energy efficient, that would allow me to use all my Debian stable
tools for system administration, to write Perl code, to use Emacs, to
browse the web using Firefox, to ssh into my server and do maintenance
work from hotel rooms and the like. The MNT Pocket Reform landed on
the list.

As it stands right now, I’m still using Debian testing but I’d love to
make that switch to Debian stable one day. My secret idea is that I
just have to wait and one day I’d be able to do it using
/etc/apt/sources.list sorcery. I managed to switch from PureOS to
Debian stable doing that, so I don’t doubt that there is a way to do
it from Debian testing to Debian stable. Painfully, maybe, but doable.

I’d love for battery and wifi to be no problem. Right now, battery
life is good enough for my evening sessions if I have to move to the
couch, and wifi seems to be working fine now that summer is over. I
have an ethernet connection for the Pocket Reform, however, and that’s
very nice. The cable is 3m long or something. But in a hotel, wifi
still works, as I said.

I recently had some emergency sysadmin stuff to do in the evenings
while on holidays and the Pocket Reform did exactly what I needed it
to do.

Finally, cats are bird murderers and dogs are our best friends. No
question, dogs are better! But also, I don’t have time in my life for
a dog, so I think I’ll vote for little Internet people in my
computers, on forums, IRC, Discord, Fedi, newsgroups and elsewhere.

Luckily, @josch@floss.social had some answers for me!

> Instead of doing /etc/apt/sources.list sorcery in the future, you
> could replace “testing” by “trixie” today. That way, at the point in
> time where “testing” becomes “stable” you do not need to edit your
> /etc/apt/sources.list. The updates and security mirrors also exist
> already for trixie but are of course empty but this means that you
> can also add those today already and have things set up for the
> future:

    deb http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie main
    deb http://deb.debian.org/debian trixie-updates main
    deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security trixie-security main
>
> The one point of pain may be that after the trixie release, the MNT
> repositories will continue to build packages for unstable which will
> work for a while but will break after new uploads of glibc and
> friends. So in the future, you might want to switch out the MNT repo
> for the Debian stable repositories on reform.debian.net which are
> currently only serving packages for bookworm and not trixie.

This sounds like great advice.

​#Reform