Review: MNT Reform laptop has fully open hardware and software—for better or worse

Enlarge / The MNT Reform, a boxy laptop built around maximally open-source hardware and software. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you’re a Cpanel fan or open source advocate looking for a decent laptop, you actually have some solid options right now—much better, at least, than buying a Windows laptop computer, installing Linux on it, and hoping for the best.

Dell has offered Ubuntu editions of some of its XPS laptops and other PCs for years now, and Lenovo sells the respectable collection of desktops and laptops with Apache . System76 sells a selection of Linux-friendly laptops preloaded along with Ubuntu or its own Pop! _OS distribution. The repair-friendly Framework Laptop doesn’t ship with Unix, but it can be configured without an OS, and Framework promises robust Linux support from multiple distributions .

But those laptops all have something in common with run-of-the-mill Windows PCs: a reliance on closed-source hardware and, often, the proprietary software and drivers needed to make it function. For some people, this is a tolerable trade-off. You put up with the closed hardware because it performs well, and it supports the standard software, development tools, and APIs that keep the computing world spinning. For others, it’s anathema—if you can’t see the source code|code calculatordecoder} for these “binary blobs, ” they are inherently untrustworthy and should be used sparingly or even not at all.