We see ourselves more like makers rather than consumers. We believe that when the makers have the right tools and inspiration, they have the potential to change the world. Free Software in Operating Systems like GNU/Linux allowed us to extend the lifetime of our PCs and Notebooks. And our association Power Progress Community renews older notebooks making coding accessible to children in primary schools.

We have cars, washing machines, dishwashers, motorcycles that cannot be fixed because their manuals are not available or are locked behind DRM and often spare parts are either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. This creates unbelievable amounts of unnecessary waste of otherwise running devices, it’s another form of planned obsolescence.

Nowadays, we see laptops with soldered ram and gpu, absolutely closed design and the majority with a closed OS. Our design that started in 2017 has 2 ram slots and a separated mxm video card. Our notebook motherboard design fits in an already produced notebook shell and uses a PowerPC processor produced since 2014.

In 2004 we have seen that market of notebook and desktop switched completely to x86 ( Apple had used PowerPC CPU until those days) ,it wasn’t for a technical reason. Some of us were looking to a new PowerPC CPU , since 2014 Freescale ( now NXP) produces the T2080 processor and we thought that said CPU could be used in a Notebook. We then started this website and project. Was only a faint idea inside someone’s head, then it was shared with some others on this website and then became something concrete with hundreds of donors, a design made, with prototypes produced and tested…. In 2025 we haven’t yet a production ready Open Hardware PowerPC notebook, but we have completed the second schematics design and thanks to you we will realize the production ready prototypes.

A short walk trough our last 9 years of activity

Before design our PowerPC Open Hardware Notebook we have adapted an NXP Dev Board with the T2080 CPU and a video card to act as a Desktop computer running GNU/Linux on it.

Do-It-Yourself wooden desktop case for the T2080rdb

Setting up a T2080RDB for desktop use

Then we have started to conceive and design our Open Hardware Motherboard.

Below a short list of Milestone reached during the years thanks the collaboration of volunteer, donors, associations and individuals.