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Comment by Loic | Hacker News Reader

An alternative I am very happy with is the SuperNote[0]. You can do screen mirroring and this is effectively really nice to quickly draw diagram during a meeting.

The only inconvenient of the approach is that the SuperNote is starting a small webserver and you basically use Firefox to access it. It is very responsive as one would expect, but this means that you need to have your laptop/computer on the same network as the SuperNote. In a home office setup, this is not an issue, but at work, your company policy may prevent this.

Anyway, be it RM2 or SuperNote, these tools are great for people who enjoy writing done ideas with pen and paper. The feeling is really different than doing it in an app or just text document. You can doodle in your notes :-)

[0]: https://supernote.com/

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Using a Onyx Boox Note and it also works great. They are even releasing updates after more than 5 years.

(When buying , you have to ignore the GPL violations: it is completely Android and they are not releasing their OS sources)

But they are violating the GPL or am I understanding this wrong? If they are, isn't that a bad actor folks here should probably strive to avoid?

They are. They actively refuse to release the sources. And yeah they should be avoided.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_Boox#GPL_Compliance

If your principles are such that you won’t buy a product due to a realistically immaterial instance of a GPL violation, sure. Given the number of GPL violations in the wild I refuse to believe that anyone but the most Stallman-esque among us are living to this standard.

I don’t see how it’s immaterial.

Because they are not releasing sources, it’s really hard to install alternative Android distributions on their devices.

Last I looked (which was 1-2 years ago), there were no alternative firmware for their devices.

Given the GPL violations in the wild, we should maybe try and not encourage them.

It's not immaterial, it's literally the point of the GPL. If they don't want to release their modifications they shouldn't take advantage of the huge effort that went into the linux kernel. Maybe use a different OS and license it..

Fair enough. Everybody can try to create their own community with their own rules. You seem to have decided that you prefer a community that doesn't adhere to licensing agreements. Don't be surprised if other communities exclude you.

Edited for clarity

Eeehmm. I mean.

I can understand not being ideologically aligned with Stallman and Co.

I also agree that there must be lots of violations of the GPL out there. Software is often invisible.

That said, I don’t think there’s many big companies out there openly doing it. If get caught, they comply with the minimum effort possible, but they comply. I don’t see them being blatant or cavalier about it.

Two main reasons for me to avoid them:

1. The attitude makes them untrustworthy. If they are blatantly violating this, what else are they willing to ignore? They have obligations towards me as a consumer, for example. Will they respect those? Will they sale my data to others?

2. There’s no guarantee that they will continue being able to operate in my country. A judge could theoretically force them to close shop. So I’d rather not put my data on their product.

Imagine if we treated copyright material like this.

"You bought tickets to Avatar 2? Given the number of pirated copies online, I refuse to believe that anyone but the idiots among us are willing to pay for content."

You are right. But I bought one knowingly and it works well.

Microsoft has been a horrible, anti competitor company built on unethical values yet I chose their Office 365 in my company. Many here use their products and take a salary from such a company.

Google has left the “don’t be evil” in the dust, with anti competitive measures and short changing employees. Hardly ethical, yet widely used in this crowd, and many here choose to draw a salary from them.

I hate the Castro brothers and what it does to Cuban people, but I do smoke a cigar now and then.

I hate Nestle, but have a Nespresso.

I hate Big Oil but drive an ICE as is only viable option.

And so on.

My point is both parts are right. Companies can un unethical or illegal things, we can stay away from their products out of principles, or cave in out of (a) having no principles or (b) being practical.

In reality I think we all cave in a bit (even Stallman and co), so virtue signaling for choosing the hard path sometimes feels hypocrital.

If you could, yes. Unfortunately Onyx Boox offers one of a kind products which its competitors don't really come close.

That feels like the start of talking past each other here heh. GP is making a values statement. If a good product gets to be exempt from the values in someone’s value system, then any product is.

More likely here following the law in this instance isn’t part of your value system, and neither is free/libre software being used on its authors’ terms, so you are (internally) free to decide to buy something even if it doesn’t adhere to the GPL. If I’m right about that, adherence to these things is a (maybe very-)nice-to-have rather than a core value, whereas the GP I think is coming from a place where one of those is a core value.

> Unfortunately Onyx Boox offers one of a kind products which its competitors don't really come close.

I wonder if absent the Linux kernel they be capable of offering a one of a kind product? It would be more accurate here to say that if they could keep their code proprietary that would be nice for them, but unfortunately the Linux kernel offers them a one of a kind base to build a product on and so they need to take the compromise and release their modifications as GPL if they want to be able to build a good product.

Is it one of a kind? Or does it have competitors? If the only way you can compete is by breaking the rules... why would anybody want to play with you?

What makes the Boox tablets unique isn't their Linux kernel, it's their customizations to Android to make the UI more usable on a slow e-Ink display. They could release their kernel sources to comply with the GPL and still keep their Android skin to themselves, just like every other Android device manufacturer does.

Remarkable 2 ftw

Remarkable 2 can't even run Android apps, the main selling point of Onyx Boox. You can't read Kindle book, Libby, whatever service your local library use, etc.

There's a lot of people here that are opposed to IP restrictions/protections of any kind.

Their whole handling of the situation suggests that the company doesn't care about any regulation and they're just as likely to lie or refuse to comply with other legal requirements for their products. When asked about source code they actually said, "well, the US is anti-China, so we don't think we should have to."

That just doesn't make me feel confident about their products. If something goes wrong is there going to be customer support, or are they going to decide one day that I don't get that because I live in the US? If I order an Onyx Boox can I trust it will even be the same hardware as someone else gets or are they going to treat labeling requirements as optional as well?

People get bent out of shape about TikTok, but TikTok has never said, "we don't think we should have to obey legal requirements because we're mad at you." And it's so transparently just an excuse for them to do what they want, their anger about anti-China sentiment in the US is not preventing from selling to the US. Convenient that it only prevents them from obeying legal requirements. I don't see how I could trust a company with these kinds of business practices, they're advertising to me that the moment it's in their best interest they'll break the law and throw me under the bus.

I've been searching for ereader/note taking e-ink tablets so thank you for the recommendation. I was going back and forth between the Remarkable 2 and Boox devices. What has your experience been like with regards to SuperNote's software updates? I'm weary of getting a device that won't be supported with feature, or at the very least, security updates for the next 3-5 years.

IIRC, they do not comply with the GPL of software they ship, or have they changed their stance on this?

I did not face the “being on the same network” problem yet. But I already know that implementing a native Ngrok feature is straightforward and a couple minute work. It would allow to stream over internet.

Thanks for sharing! How does the writing experience on the supernote compares to the RM2?

Having used both the best description would be the Supernote a5x is like writing with a rollerball pen, where the Remarkable is like writing with a pencil.

Both are good, fluid, responsive, but slightly different

I'm not the person you're replying to, and I've not compared them myself directly, but I've heard a few people describe it as the difference between writing with pen (Supernote) and writing with pencil (RM2). At least on the Supernote side, that matches with my experience - it's fairly smooth, but it does feel like you're writing on paper rather than, say, a glass screen.

There is almost no noticeable lag while writing, and even while doing more complicated things like scrolling through my Kindle list, or resizing a block of writing, the screen keeps up very well.

Purely from my perspective, I find the smaller screen size (roughly A5 dimensions) of my Supernote a lot nicer than the more A4-proportioned Remarkable, but that's just a preference thing - I like writing in smaller notebooks in general. You can also get the Supernote in a size closer to the Remarkable if that's more what you want though.

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