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Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

Calibre is another well known case, and they don't plan to migrate.

Actually, I can't wait to remove it from my hard drive on Jan 1, since it's one of the most poorly designed apps I've ever used. It's really not surprising at all that they're not able to migrate it, assuming the quality of the app is indicative of the quality of the code. I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true of a lot of applications that are refusing to migrate. (I'll probably have to find an alternative to ebook-convert, the command line tool that's the only part of Calibre I use, or maybe I'll rewrite it in Python 3 myself.)

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The only good part of calibre is the `ebook-convert` commandline tool that has a stupid-simple interface (polar opposite of the gui) and handles all kinds of formats that pandoc doesn't.

The gui, Calibre proper, is a total nightmare. Functional, but my god is it esoteric and ugly. I've heard people actually use that gui as their primary ebook reading software and I just can't fathom how they find that tolerable.

https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert....

I dislike Calibre main GUI as well. It looks a bit dated and all, but really convenient for downloading books from Userfiction forums like Spacebattles via the Fanficfare plugin. Also good for simple editing of ebook metadata. Built-in ebook-viewer is highly configurable with custom keybindings and themable with custom CSS.This is my setup

https://imgur.com/a/nlAAlZn

I use Calibre as my primary e-book reader. I don't see many alternatives on Linux.

I basically use Calibre ebook viewer for its configurability and customization. If you want a good ebook reader, give Foliate (https://github.com/johnfactotum/foliate) a try. That and Bookworm (https://github.com/babluboy/bookworm) are the best standalone ebook readers I've seen in Linux.

Other than having a simpler layout I don't really see either as better than calibres reader. What's better other than looks?

That's not true. https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/blob/master/README.pyt... https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/pull/870

If that's the case, I'm glad to see things are changing. Up until very recently, there seem to have been no plans to switch: https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107

> No, it doesn't [need to convert to Python 3]. I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself. Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase.

> I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself.

That's a very strange quote. I want to have this much self-confidence.

Calibre is, in fact, migrating. There are at this point dozens of commits over the past few months to that goal. Not sure what changed his mind.

Reality? You can maintain an absurd, unintuitive, dated UI by yourself fairly easily, but even someone who pushes out two minor updates per week is going to be taking on a little too much in my opinion if they believe they can also support a fork of a major language.

And make a gnome core app with GTK3? That would pretty cool :)

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