It's sad that it's been 25+ years in the making to finally get something sort of okay, and even then it's ridiculously expensive by contrast of closed source. Why can't we have something thinkpad-like for the cost? Don't they know they'd make metric craptons of money on something like that?
> Don't they know they'd make metric craptons of money on something like that?
They would? Thinkpad margins aren't that great to begin with (which is why IBM sold the business off to Lenovo). So now take out every high-volume, low cost component in there and replace it with something less popular. Because you no longer have those economies of scale you don't have the best fabs so the thermal profile of everything in there sucks, so you have to find some way to put the thing in a lap without causing permanent damage. And then you're marketing the thing to the users of the third-most-popular desktop OS, where the breakdown of market share is something like 90/8/2. But then not to users of the most popular desktop Linux distro, or even the top 10 most popular Linux distros, to the people who use stuff like Gnusense.
I think you should be able to just grab an equivlent x200 off of ebay (possibly with a different wlan card added) - and be safe (as in safe that you can run libreboot, not any guarantees about firmware in all the dark corners, like ethernet card).
I've been considering trying libreboot on my T420s - but as I use it almost every day, it's a bit high risk in case I brick it.
In the original blog post for the project, they explicitly anticipated this complaint and stated that this simply wasn't their goal. Novena is not intended to be a mass market Thinkpad clone, it is a laptop made by OSHW hackers for OSHW hackers. Hence why it includes an FPGA and plenty of GPIO pins.
