PublicLewdness @publiclewdness@gameliberty.club

I recently purchased a NovaCustom NV41 to replace my aging T400 laptop. I have been very happy with my NV41 as well as NovaCustom as a whole. Before my purchase they not only answered my questions about the differences between Heads and UEFI but did so in detail with comparison screenshots. The laptop had more customization options available than pretty much any other brand I could find. The laser engraving on the palm rest looks fantastic. The laptop shipped within a couple business days and arrived to my doorstep in Canada about seven days from when I purchased it which I find to be great turnaround time. Unlike some other brands they include duties and fees in the price I paid so I didn't have to worry about how much extra I would have to pay once it hit Canada's border and my government would take an extra pound of flesh from me. The laptop was well packaged and everything on the inside was in pristine condition.

The build quality of the laptop has been great. All I have to do is remove the screws from the bottom panel and then I have full access to the fans, the wifi, the NVME, pretty much everything but the keyboard. Upgrades and maintenance will be very easy like this. The battery life is fairly good so far. I get about 3 hours and 45 minutes from full charge to about 10% left. This is with zero tweaks and the screen running at full brightness so I can probably improve that with some effort. I run the libre kernel on my NV41 which is probably worse for battery life than the normal kernel so take that into account. For comparison my librebooted T400 with a Q9300 CPU got about 2 hours of battery life on the libre kernel so I get almost double the life compared to what my old laptop got. The fans are usually quiet and only ramp up when playing a game or doing a heavy task.

Performance wise my NV41 has been great for word processing, email, web browsing, as well as 2D games and visual novels. I opted for the i7-1260P CPU, 32GB RAM, and the blob free wifi chip. You can play some 3D games on the laptop but that would be better suited for a gaming desktop which I have.

I would highly recommend NovaCustom and will be sure to buy from them again in the future. The service has been great as well as I find Dasharo to be the best Coreboot variant I have used in terms of BIOS options. The price was more than reasonable as for $2296 CAD I received a great laptop, a laptop bag, a docking station, two adapters, and shipping/duties covered. Pretty much the only complaint I can think of is that I wish there was a visual indication on the keyboard when Caps lock is on. That's literally the only critique I have which is very minor and not a real issue at all. I am using Devuan 5 with the libre kernel and SysVinit on my NV41 and everything has worked out of the box without any issue.

#novacustom #dasharo #devuan #systemdfree #linux

I received my new keyboard today. I went with the System76 Launch Heavy model and went with the silent brown keys. I placed the order on July 23 so it took seven days total/five business days to assemble the keyboard, ship it, and for it to get from Colorado to Southern Ontario. Not bad i'd say. I liked how System76 called and emailed before finalizing the order. They put a code with the charge that shows on my credit card and I had to provide that to finalize things. It's a good security measure as a person would have to have access to your credit card login as well as the card in order to use it.

The keyboard was $334 USD plus $101.38 USD for shipping. That came out to about $672 CAD. Add on another $78.93 at the border for the government to take it's pound of flesh and the total was about $750.93 CAD. The shipping time was good but a tad expensive. I shipped a whole assembled desktop all the way to Nunavut in the same amount of time for $161 so you think the size difference between a keyboard and a desktop would have wararnted a bigger difference in price.

Many would balk at spending so much on a keyboard but I like the fact that the firmware and drivers are FOSS. I like that I got a choice of what kind of switches are used. I liked that I got a choice of what size of keyboard was used. I liked that it was assembled in somewhere more local than China.

The software for it is also FOSS and there is an App Image for it for those that don't use PopOS. You can customize a ton. You can customize the keys on four layers. You can also customize the backlighting with a range of solid colors or a pattern. You can update the firmware through Gnome Firmware which is itself a FOSS program.

The box came with the keyboard, quick guide, a typce c to USB-A cable, a type C to type cable, a bunch of extra keys and a tool to remove them. The extra keys are for if you want to customize certain keys the color of various keys on the keyboard. Say switch from white, to red, blue, etc.

My only real complaint so far is that they didn't pack the box for the keyboard in another box. As it was the seal for the shipping documents was taped onto it and didn't fully come off. That's pretty minor. I would have loved a wrist guard for the bottom of the keyboard but that's not a deal breaker. Quality wise I am liking typing on it so far. I have to get used to the size though, my old Corsair K70 was larger. Overall for $750 CAD I am happy so far.

#system76 #fosshardware #qmkfirmware #linux #fwupd

Good to know the government is willing to steal more of my money to help someone else buy a house instead of letting me keep it to help me buy my first house.

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/mobile/feds-commit-10-million-to-help-200-black-families-in-gta-buy-their-first-home-1.5786938

Sums up many people's logic lately.