[email protected] wrote:
a bit unrelated but:
i came across this:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena
any thoughts?
seems a bit too good to be true that someone made a powerfull computer
with a completely free hardware design.
Despite the physical dimensions and overall appearance, the Novena does
not seem to me to be a computer comparable to a laptop intended for
general-purpose use such as a Librem laptop computer. But the Novena and
Librem computers share the lack of a completely free software OS.
I'm not sure what you mean by "free hardware". The Novena page you
pointed us to says that there are no free software drivers for some of
the hardware they chose to put into the computer:
- "graphics: there are no Free Software drivers for the 3D core. There
is an ongoing project to reverse engineer and develop Free Software
graphics drivers."
- "video: there are no Free Software drivers for the hardware video
accelerator DSP, but there are gstreamer libraries available."
and the Novena computer is aimed at people looking for "a piece of lab
equipment, and less as a device for entertainment or recreational use".
As far as the Novena's specs go, 4GiB RAM doesn't strike me as a lot of
RAM for a personal computer anymore, but (as far as I can tell from the
page) the Novena's maximum RAM is 4GiB. I'd also prefer USB3, gigabit
ethernet, and a 64-bit CPU. But since I'm not doing much electronics
hacking, this is not the computer I'd pick for my general-purpose use.
Perhaps the Novena would be more interesting to me if I did the kind of
work its developers do.
