Sometimes I feel that if Calibre just looked better people would realize how amazing it is. It’s honestly not that bad (I actually love it) but I think people can’t get past the aesthetic.
And I’m not even talking about non intuitive UI. For something that has supposed to be a library it’s nowhere near real library (alphabetical list of authors).
What do you mean?
I just click the 'Author' column header and it sorts.
100gb is very big though. I guess I'm not surprised you would have problems with a library that size.
This post on reddit is relevant.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/jl3wd2/how_large_i...
At a few mb per, 100gb is centuries of reading.
Unless it’s comic books?
I understand that most folks probably have 10-300 books, but in my case I have some large libraries I tried to use with Calibre, and it just absolutely DIES.
The steadfast decision to exclusively use SQLite doesn't help. I opened a PR back in 2016 or so, but the maintainer was quite enthusiastically opposed to changing the DB layer or making it pluggable.
He is however an asshole on the level of Linus when it comes to bug reports and community support.
Calibre afaik was created from scratch.
Those are two entirely different circumstances from which to start from and it’s inevitable they would have vastly divergent results even in the same hands.
“ It's a big shame that whenever anything related to Calibre is posted, top comments will often be how arrogant is author is. I used to think the same. But when I read his comments history in GitHub, he doesn't seem a dick to me at all. So I googled his name, and end up in a forum. It completely changed my mind. Contrary to what people believe, Dovid Goyal is the most friendly programmer to his users. He spent lots of time answering questions in the forum https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166. His answers include where is a menu located, how to convert a book from one format to another, helping the user to debug the exact the problem with Calibre. He has been doing this daily and is very responsive. You can expect an answer to your question in the same day. (The forum used to allow you to read user's comments history anonymously, but now you need a account to do so)”
Sounds very reasonable. I am pretty sure that SQLite isn‘t the problem. It is actually faster than traditional client server DBs in many cases.
It took me the better part of the year to figure out how and why QGIS wouldn't just let me draw geometry like I can in a vector drawing tool. I still have to read the docs every time to figure out most selection manipulation actions in GIMP or decode the icons.
With Calibre and GIMP in particular, most people don't need most of its functionality, and easier but weaker tools exist that can do the same things. Almost all of my image editing is in Krita now because it's about as powerful and much more intuitive. If Citadel becomes the Krita of ebook readers, I'd readily use it just on the UI even if it's just as unstable.
And why would anyone force themselves with its "aesthetic" when you can spin up calibre-web container and get a nice UI and an OPDS in a few seconds?
I am going to try and use it again today and see if I can get used to it. It really is fantastic for a free product especially for a power user.
Calibre hasn't used Python 2 in years.