I bought a Milk-V Mars (4GB version) last year. Pi-like form factor and price seemed like an easy pick for dipping my toes into RISC-V development, and I paid US$49 plus shipping at the time. There’s an 8GB version too but that was out of stock when I ordered.

If I wanted to spend more I’d personally prefer to put that budget toward a higher core system (for faster compile times) before any laptop parts, as either HDMI+USB or VNC would be plenty sufficient even if I did need to work on GUI things.

Other RISC-V laptops already are cheaper and with higher performance than this would be with Framework’s shell+screen+battery, so I’m not sure what need this fills. If you intend to use the board in an alternate case without laptop parts you might as well buy an SBC instead.

This board has the StarFive JH7110 SoC. That processor has previously been in very low power single board computers like StarFive VisionFive 2 (2022) and Milk-V Mars (2023), a Raspberry Pi clone that can be bought for as low as $40. Its storage limitations (SD/eMMC rather than NVMe) show how much this isn’t meant for laptop use.

Very underpowered for a laptop too, even when considering this is intended for developers and doesn’t need to be remotely performance competitive. Consider that this has just 4 RV64GC cores, the cheapest Intel board options Framework offers are 12 cores (4P+8E), and any modern RISC-V core is far simpler with less area than even an Intel E core. These cores also lack the RISC-V vector instructions extension.

I’m not completely sure but I think they removed it at some point after the public backlash (which was 3 years ago now). For the Windows version at least, there apparently used to be an option during the installation wizard for setting whether telemetry is enabled or not. Most Linux distros never had the telemetry at all. I don’t know about Mac.

It is open source, but had some controversy. Most prominently the addition of telemetry a few years ago, which was never included in the builds managed by Debian or most other distro maintainers. They also added a Contributor License Agreement which lets the Audacity project change its own license (even to a non-foss one, though they promise they won’t) without needing to have the change approved by any individual developers.

and it’s free

This is very uncommon in the US. Most major banks (I’m not aware of any exceptions) charge a fee for each outgoing wire transfer, usually $25-$30. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, and PNC for just a few examples I’m aware of, plus every credit union that has local branches in my area. Some of those banks even add a second fee at the recipient’s side for incoming wire transfer.

They often encourage customers to rely on third party services like Zelle instead for small transfers to friends and family. Many banks’ sites/apps can also handle transfers between two accounts that both belong to the same bank for free too.

Even their earliest “uncarrier” features weren’t without issue. Making certain services (spotify, apple music, youtube, netflix, etc.) not count against subscribers’ data caps, while continuing to enforce data caps for other uses, goes against the spirit of net neutrality. This also includes throttling video streams by default to force lower quality (with opt-out on their site).

Promos like a free pizza on Tuesdays seems like a neat optional perk on the surface but their existence fundamentally mean subscription expenses on cellular network service are partially going towards things that have not even the slightest tangential connection to the service.

It is a Linux machine. Runs a Debian derivative, and it’s not like Windows or anything else that isn’t Linux/BSD can run on a RISC-V laptop.

This isn’t the first RISC-V laptop, but the significance of a RISC-V laptop existing is primarily for developers who work on software targeting RISC-V systems. The ability to run RV64 programs without emulation and to natively compile RV64 software without cross-compilers is valuable to some people. Also, China in particular sees value in having computing products that aren’t affected by sanctions; the processor in this is designed and manufactured by a Chinese company without licensing any intellectual property from US or UK.

There actually is a silent and very subtle revision they made to the dpad less than a year after Switch launched (iirc around the time of the Xenoblade 2 controller). The protrusion out the middle of the underside was made slightly longer, which makes you less able to push down all four directions at the same time. The chance of undesired diagonals is very high either way but just slightly lower for the newer one.

Even the improved version is one of Nintendo’s worst dpads ever (including handhelds) imo, with only the GameCube’s coming remotely close. A huge step back from Wii U Pro’s dpad.

A ground-up overhaul of the copyright system would make things so much worse, not better, considering the current climate of power. In the US for example, MPA, RIAA, Entertainment Software Association, Association of American Publishers, and others wouldn’t want public libraries or the used market to exist at all; they would push for making every single transfer of “ownership” on any media involve a payment to the rights holder. Lawmakers are far more likely to accommodate those groups’ desires than the public good.

The worst parts of the current copyright system are the most recent. Both the DMCA and the extension of US copyright term to 95 years took effect in 1998, and the early 2000s saw many other countries passing laws to make their copyright system closer to US’s in various ways such as the WIPO Copyright Treaty which took effect in 2002 and EU’s 2006 Copyright Directive. Just about the only positive news we’ve seen in US copyright law since then is in temporary exemptions to DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules (Section 1201) which change every year. Copyright law was far less hostile to consumers and the public before the 90s than it is now, and up until 1976 it used to be expected that most media someone consumes would enter public domain within their lifetime.

The digital era makes market relevance far more ephemeral than ever and yet the laws written for the digital era moved copyright in the opposite direction. Movie studios simultaneously judge whether a film succeeded almost exclusively based on its first week of ticket sales and also claim that depriving public domain for 95 years is necessary. Nothing should be able to justify more than 20 years of copyright. Media formats don’t even last as long as copyright; CDs and DVDs rot, game cartridges die, servers shut down, and even books printed on today’s low-quality paper will fall apart.

Some of it is absurd to me, like the way something can be online but geographically restricted.

This is a consequence of contract terms moreso than copyright. One issue in copyright law that this does connect to, though, is the fact that the question of whether the rightsholder keeps a work reasonably available on the market does not impact whether the work retains copyright protections. If copyright law did hypothetically include that limitation, providers would become far more likely to make sure that all content is available in all countries, but even then things could still vary in terms of which content is on which platform.

That’s strange. As far as I can tell from any web searches, every version Windows still defaults to storing local time to the hardware clock and there are no reports of that changing with an update, nor is there any exposed setting control to configure this behavior outside of regedit. If you’re curious enough, you can check the current setting in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation. Windows maintains the current time as UTC if and only if the RealTimeIsUniversal key is present and nonzero.

I expect it’s more likely some other issue would make the BIOS display an hour that’s inconsistent with your local timezone. For example, maybe a bug in the BIOS, maybe a timezone offset setting within the BIOS, or maybe a dead clock battery.

Unix time is far less universal in computing than you might hope. A few exceptions I’m aware of:

• Most real-time clock hardware stores datetime as separate binary-coded decimal fields representing months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds as one byte each, and often the year too (resulting in a year 2100 limit).
• Python’s datetime, WIN32’s SYSTEMTIME, Java’s LocalDateTime, and MySQL’s DATETIME similarly have separate attributes for year, month, day, etc.
• NTFS stores a 64-bit number representing time elapsed since the year 1601 in 100-nanosecond resolution for things like file creation time.
• NTP uses an epoch of midnight 1900-01-01 with unsigned seconds elapsed and an unusual base-2 fractional part
• GPS uses an epoch of midnight 1980-01-06 with a week number and time within the week as separate values.

Converting between time formats is a common source of bugs and each one will overflow in different ways. A time value might overflow in the year 2036, 2038, 2070, 2100, 2156, or 9999.

Also, Unix time is often managed with a separate nanoseconds component for increased resolution. Like in C struct timespec, modern *nix filesystems like ext4/xfs/btrfs/zfs, etc.

as soon as the BIOS loaded and showed the time, it was “wrong” because it was in UTC

Because you don’t use Windows. Windows by default stores local time, not UTC, to the RTC. This behavior can be overriden with a registry tweak. Some Linux distro installer disks (at least Ubuntu and Fedora, maybe others) will try to detect if your system has an existing Windows install and mimicks this behavior if one exists (equivalent to timedatectl set-local-rtc 1) and otherwise defaults to storing UTC, which is the more sane choice.

Storing localtime on a computer that has more than one bootable OS becomes a particularly noticable problem in regions that observe DST, because each OS will try to change the RTC by one hour on its first boot after the time change.

Yes.

My home server has dropbear-initramfs installed so that after reboot I can access the LUKS decryption prompt over SSH. The one LUKS partition contains a btrfs filesystem with both rootfs and home as subvolumes. For all the other drives attached to that system, I use ZFS native encryption with a dataset that decrypts with a keyfile from that rootfs and I have backups of an encrypted copy of that keyfile.

I don’t think there’s a substantial performance impact but I’ve never bothered benchmarking.

The problem with those TV apps is DRM. All the major streaming services require that you either use a locked down platform (probably checking SafetyNet and more on Android TV) or settle for their browser UI which lacks dpad support and gets quality throttled to 1080p or lower.

Circumventing that DRM is possible, but no project at the scale of a platform like those would dare the both legal risk and support headache of making those circumventions (which are very liable to break) a core part of the OS.

Kodi (and distros using it like LibreELEC) exist for people who want a FOSS platform for using non DRM encumbered media with a TV remote interface.

Something I’ve noticed that is somewhat related but tangential to your problem: The result I’ve always gotten from using compose files is that container names and volume names get assigned names that contain a shared prefix by default. I don’t use docker and instead prefer podman but I would expect both to behave the same on this front. For example, when I have a file at nextcloud/compose.yml that looks like this:

volumes:
  nextcloud:
  db:

services:
  db:
    image: docker.io/mariadb:10.6
    ...
  app:
    image: docker.io/nextcloud
    ...

I end up with volumes named nextcloud_nextcloud and nextcloud_db, with containers named nextcloud_db and nextcloud_app, as long as neither of those services overrides this behavior by specifying a container_name. I believe this prefix probably comes from the file-level name: if there is one and the parent directory’s name otherwise.

The reasons I adjust my own compose files to be different from the image maintainer’s recommendation include: to accommodate the differences between podman and docker, avoiding conflicts between the exported listen ports, any host filesystem paths I want to mount in the container, and my own preferences. The only conflict I’ve had with other containers there is the exported port. zigbee2mqtt, nextcloud, and freshrss all suggest using port 8080 so I had to change at least two of them in order to run all three.

Likely reversing a major anti-consumer decision is nice, even if it took seven years.

Knowing that consumer protections repeatedly flip back and forth every time the executive branch switches political party, and even then only if we’re lucky, is not so reassuring. What’s stopping it from being repealed again in a few years?

There is one caveat: Google Play Services and by extension Google’s Play Store stopped receiving updates on Android 4.4 (released late 2013) last August, just before that OS hit 10 years old. Even so, the servers still work with that old app in the short term and there are alternatives for installing apps without relying on Google Play at all.

That 10 year age is for the OS, not the device. Nexus 4 for example launched in 2012 with Android 4.2 and got updates up to Android 5.1.1 in 2015. So it still gets Play Store updates now. You can install apps from other sources, and you don’t need to rely on internet or servers for initial setup if you don’t want to, and you can even install a custom OS like Lineage’s build of Android 8.1.

Nexus 4’s 2.5 years of OS updates was still abysmally low compared to how long phones should be perfectly usable for. Yet that 12 year old phone remains far more usable this year than a <5 year old Oculus Quest soon will be.

I never had problems with Debian stable, especially on headless server. But it’s not especially well-suited for brand new desktop hardware; even Ubuntu LTS and RHEL focus more on hardware enablement backports than Debian.

I’ve had a worse experience with Debian testing breaking my system with updates than Arch. Adding to that the freeze period (2012’s was the worst, lasting 11 months) makes testing feel like the worst of both worlds between rolling and standard release distros.

As someone who used to use Arch a decade ago: I still use pacman for devkitpro at least, and I do miss how fast its parallel downloads get, but the tool I use to manage packages is far from the most important difference between distros to me, even if you assume not needing AUR.

On Switch, no game cards support writing of save data or anything else. It’s a departure from 3DS and all previous Nintendo cart formats for as long as games have supported saving at all.

That change is probably done to help tie saves to user accounts, enable cloud saves even when the card is not inserted, accommodate variable-size user data features like level creation, and mitigate the risk of game save based exploits like Twilight Hack spreading from user to user.

Unfortunately that (plus inability to put saves on SD card) means that backing up your own save data requires either being able to run homebrew on the system that has the save or having another Switch that can and relying on Nintendo servers to perform the transfer. Either way, having a Switch that runs homebrew means you don’t need this dumper.