The biggest downside of Kobo for me has been Rakuten's update cadence. The system updates opt-out doesn't actually work from what I can tell and my device only comes out of airplane mode once every few months. Every damn time I do so it has to download an update, lagging out for a long time, and changing the UI in exciting new ways.
Works perfectly.
I don't want to send a copy of "And the Band Played On" (for example) and start getting Chick Tracts.
Calibre is king, set things right and you can just email books to your Kindle.
The MobileRead forums are where most of the unofficial discussion/development happens: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=223
That's good to hear. I have no problem with a device vendor focusing on just making sure their device works well, as long as they're not trying to close it off and actively working against external developers. I'd heard stuff like Kindle blows physical fuses so that one can't install older firmware and stuff like that so they actively prevent users from having control of their device. I have no desire to be a customer of such types of vendors.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Pocketbook-Touch-HD-Metallic-Grey/dp/...
Having used it, I don't think I could go back to Kobo's reader (and even less to Amazon's, which is a joke in term of configuration options).
Oh, and not to mention, how easier... is to just poke things? At least with Clara HD, don't have to fear about bricking it, because worst case scenario, I can just reflash the system image, and have it working again.
And few days ago I just went and replaced internal microSD card with a bigger one (First making image of original one, then flashing it to bigger, and extending partition) and it just worked.
Sadly or not, I like to hoard things locally, on the reader itself. And that includes manga. So yeah, being able to replace microSD Card was very convenient.
And the device itself is a tiny bit more responsive overall too, alongside better transfer speeds :D
I bought a 2" thick sci-fi book a few years ago, "Pandora's Star". It seemed pretty interesting, but way too much book to carry around. I got a kobo and put what I vaguely recall was named "koreader" on it. It was pretty nice. It stopped working after 6 months, though. I took it apart, and at least one power management IC is shorted out. Its e-ink display permanently says, "Sleeping..." It's been a paperweight on my nightstand for about 2 years, and a minor source of anxiety for me. I don't plan on buying another kobo device any time soon because I hate e-waste.
My wife got me a kindle paperwhite to replace it, and it didn't take much work to get the same book onto it. I think I'm maybe 25% of the way through the book, but I can't really say because I don't understand what the numbers in the lower corner mean. I also printed the Rust programming language manual to PDF and managed to copy it onto the kindle without much fuss.
If you tap on the numbers in the lower corner, you can cycle through various options including % read. My personal preference is for time left in chapter.
The interesting question is why if the systems support ePub, Amazon doesn't update the "Send to Kindle" tools to also support the extension? Those tools support .doc, .txt, .pdf, and other random things, just explicitly not .epub. It could just be that those tools are low maintenance and don't update often in general. Maybe it's simply as sinister as they don't want people to know kindles support ePubs, even though they do (because they have to) and the "Send to Kindle" tools are the primary interface people use for "what does my kindle support?" as very few users bother to directly USB their kindles and rely on wifi updates.
It's strange.
My only complaint is no equivalent of Send to Kindle for Kobo, so I always have to plug the device in if I want to copy an EPUB to it.