SpaceLizard asked: What brought you to the MNT community? Well, actually there were three questions:
What brought you to the MNT community
How did you first find out about MNT Reform and/or what brought you here?What do you do / want to do with your Reform Laptop most?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.
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
This sounds like great advice.
#Reform