> ... for around $5,300 USD.

Well, let me take a step back and first say that the project is impressive and I really like it.

But the cost is staggering.

For something rather more low-end, but good enough for some common tasks, don't forget EOMA68: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop

I own a Novena. It's a fun piece of hardware.

As just a day-to-day computer for software development, how does it work out? Can it run Firefox/Chromium just fine? What sort of issues have you had?

I've got a couple of Novenas. It's good for development except for web-browsing; for whatever reason firefox and chromium are both pretty sluggish on it. Everything else seems fine; I suspect that it's mostly down to video drivers, which are still somewhat in a state of flux (but getting better).

I'm skeptical about whether the video drivers are the culprit for poor web browsing performance. Yes, there's WebGL, but do Firefox and Chromium depend that critically on OpenGL for rendering ordinary web pages?

Yeah, Novena will be much more usable once the etnaviv drivers are ready.

I believe both the Librem laptops and the ORWL PC will soon use Coreboot, and they are much cheaper.

There's zero chance that the future Librem laptops will be "truly" open source. They will still have ME or AMD equivalent. Their entire marketing campaign is frustratingly dishonest.

They're quite competent con men. If you call them out about it (as the Coreboot developers did) especially on Reddit, they give very dismissive, yet non-committal comments

"We're in talks with Intel" "They really want to do this" "We're going to make a petition to show interest to Intel"

The reality is that even Google with their Chromebooks, despite hiring most of the Coreboot team and shipping volume into the likely millions of units, was unable to persuade Intel. Even for the absolutely tiny set of CPU models they use

Those still have the eeeeevil ME, although maybe in a semi-dormant form.