Berlin-based MNT Research is bringing its open hardware philosophy to the desktop. The MNT Station is an aluminum mini PC enclosure that accepts the same modular mainboard found in the company's Reform laptop, giving existing owners a way to repurpose their hardware and new buyers an open source desktop option. The slim enclosure measures 27.9 x 13.3 x 2.6 cm (11 x 5.2 x 1 inches) and supports flat, upright, or VESA-mounted orientations, making it suitable as a standalone workstation, NAS, or media center.
What makes the Station more than a passive case is its port cover, which packs a power button and a 10-LED light bar driven by an ATTiny microcontroller. The LEDs are fully controllable via Linux, so you can configure them to display CPU usage, network load, or whatever status information you want. Compatible with MNT Reform mainboards version 2.0 and newer, the Station inherits USB, Ethernet, HDMI, and audio ports from the mainboard, plus a 200-pin connector for swappable processor modules. Current options include the Rockchip RK3588, though MNT has previously offered modules based on NXP LS1028A, i.MX8M, a Kintex-7 FPGA, and boards compatible with Raspberry Pi CM4 and Banana Pi CM4.
Because the Station accepts the same mainboards as the Reform laptop, it carries over that platform's established Linux software ecosystem directly. MNT ships official Debian-based system images with Sway and Wayfire as default Wayland compositors, and the community-run reform.debian.net provides Debian Trixie builds, a patched Debian installer, a dedicated apt repository, and Grml Linux images covering the full Reform hardware family. NixOS users can get started through the nix-community/hardware-mnt-reform hardware module, and Arch Linux ARM and Gentoo are both documented installation paths as well.
Pricing and availability have not been announced, but MNT has posted a preview page on Crowd Supply ahead of an upcoming crowdfunding campaign. True to form, the hardware design files are already published for anyone who wants to inspect or modify the design before the campaign goes live.
