[jron]

Slow. The Nitrogen8M SOM used in the MNT Reform uses the i.MX 8M which is a 4x Cortex-A53 @1.5 GHz and a single Cortex-M4F @ 266 MHz. The performance should be comparable to a Raspberry Pi 3 B+. Still, I love the idea and I hope they support future SOMs from Boundary Devices.

[mntmn]

From my dogfooding experience, it really depends on what you need to run and what compromises you are willing to make.

The biggest slowdowns I see with javascript-heavy web applications. Native applications like LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, Ardour are fine, and so is working in terminals or with standard GTK3 apps. I also managed to patch KiCAD and etnaviv into working together to allow for GPU accelerated canvas.

"Normal" websites and PDFs are fine and scrolling is smooth in chromium. With VLC I can watch full HD H.264 movies, software decoded, and YouTube is fine too, if you can tolerate a bit longer loading times than on a faster Intel/AMD computer. There's open source driver support for H.264 video decoding, but the userland infrastructure for it is not yet in common applications.

I have to say I'm using the sway compositor, which is a clone of i3 for wayland. It's more resource efficient compared to a full blown DE like GNOME 3.

For Emacs, I use the new gccemacs branch with precompiled elisp which gives a nice speed boost.

What doesn't work: - Applications that need OpenCL - Applications that need Desktop OpenGL 3+ (currently, etnaviv does desktop OpenGL 2.1 and GLES 2.0). That means you're stuck with Blender 2.79b, for example.

Regardings the SOMs: I don't wanna tell too much yet, but we are working on several upgrades/sidegrades.

[jancsika]

> "Normal" websites and PDFs are fine and scrolling is smooth in chromium.

Any difference in your dogfooding between Chromium and FF performance? I've got a Pinebook Pro and Chromium seems to load heavy pages considerably faster than FF.

Also-- what's the heat like when, say, playing video on one of the heavier websites? Like Reddit's infinite scroll where various cat videos are just flying past and autoplaying. Not that I've ever gotten caught in that hot loop... :)

[mntmn]

Chromium tends to be a bit faster rendering wise, but there’s a new fix for etnaviv which allows smooth layer compositing in FF now as well. Javascript heavy apps and WebGL are faster in Chromium for me.

I don’t have any reddit experience to speak of.

But for example, mastodon is much faster than twitter, even if they have very similar functionality.

[jancsika]

> I don’t have any reddit experience to speak of.

Sorry, I just meant a sort-of "stress test" where both CPU and GPU are being used heavily. I'm curious if part of the laptop can get a bit hot as the PBP can under these conditions.