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.
