While Calibre has a full management, editing and authoring suite, it also has a nice internal reader with reading features.
It's not like the Photoshop, but rather the ACDSee suite, which comes with a full fledged image browser and viewer.
I can't comment on the Python2.x dependencies though.
Also looks like any Python3 patch doesn't break the current Calibre build is welcome indeed.
Additionally, there is the problem of compability. Configuration in Calibre is python-code, and on several corners the user can mod stuff. Any transition would need to make sure to not brake things to hard.
Python2 as a platform will slowly die and any application depending on it will die with it. Though, this won't become a serious problem in the next years, but more like 5-10+ years.
It's sad, but the reality now.
But calibre is desktop-software, it depends on the OS, the GUI-Framework and whats more... Though, it's actually only a bigger deal for linux, beacuse on Windows and Mac OS is custom to deliver compiled versions from the Project itself. Also there is not wayland-situation on windows and Mac OS, which might break GUI-Libs. But as Calibre has so many different gears it's depending on, there is a good chance that something will break after a certain point.
> Someone like Red Hat will probably keep maintaining Python 2 for at least some years more.
Actually, Red Hat is already dropping python2 for their next enterprise-version as I read. They will probably still have a somewhat maintainend version available somehow, but it's obvious that python2 is slowly phasing out now. And many remaining companies are now starting transition too as EOL is near.
At this point you can already can predict that python2 will have reached minimal levels of usage in 5 years.
I'm not at my main workstation at home, so I cannot compare now, but it's a very strange situation.
Only one is usually lacking. I think it's mobi or epub, but never bother to pin it down because I just combine then in one entry anyway, and then the metadata will be merged together.
Calibre has usually no problem with extracting metadata from files, independant from the source.
In the import/add books settings, there is an option to use the filename instead of the metadata. Try changing that?
Its RAM requirement is more than the capacity of my first hard drive, but it's not in the league of Chrome, Slack or Atom. There are many wasteful applications out there doing much much less with much more resources.
Also, I had to drop Calibre due to the large number of Python 2 and imagemagik dependencies that have a maintenance cost when it comes to pulling updated packages & so on.
Making Calibre modular would have helped greatly but the author never cared.
Huge amount of RAM usage is subjective term. For me, Chrome, Slack and Atom are memory hogs. While I do not find the RAM usage of Calibre optimal, I think its RAM usage is reasonable with that feature set for me. Eclipse is also using ~1.1GB of RAM, but it's not a memory hog from my perspective, because I get what I give as productivity and features that I actually use and benefit.
>... ignoring bookworm and other more reasonable applications.
No, I'm not. Above, here [0], I said that Bookworm is a nice application, but my needs are different. Also, I compared Atom with another functionally-similar text application and said that similar applications (like BBEdit) use ~60MB, but Atom uses 660MB out of the box.
Similarly, since Bookworm doesn't provide the features that I need, installing it would be moot, since it'll sit unused on my disk, actually wasting disk space from my point of view. However, this doesn't make Bookworm a bad application. If it provides the functionality one needs, then I'm happy for them. Also its user interface is elegant and minimal, this another plus for Bookworm.
> Also, I had to drop Calibre due to the large number of Python 2 and imagemagik dependencies that have a maintenance cost when it comes to pulling updated packages & so on.
I don't know your OS and setup, and can't comment on that. However, major distros are doing the required maintenance, so many people are just installing it on their systems.
> Making Calibre modular would have helped greatly but the author never cared.
I don't know internal architecture of Calibre, so I can't say anything about this issue. However modularity has its own set of benefits and problems.