Comment by minimalist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by minimalist | Hacker News Reader

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Every now and again, I see stories about Onyx and their tablets pop up and I have to dust off this old comment of mine [0]. I've since sold the tablet and picked up a remarkable that I am very happy with and have modified in many ways.

Long story short: - Onyx still doesn't release kernel sources

- Onyx still uses outdated and vulnerable builds of Android, with questionable settings such as disabling SELinux

- Their devices are very chatty back to servers in the PRC.

- Their digitizer API is still hostile to developers.

- They shut down their support forums when the chorus of disgruntled customers began to get too loud

And even worse, they are using "anti-China movement" as an excuse to not comply with the GPL. This company is shit and no one should give them any money. And yet, all of these "review sites" (full of every kind of affiliate link imaginable) can't help themselves from riding the gravy train of free product from this company.

Edit: And then there are large threads like this [2] where people recognize all the problems and try to "secure" their devices. （ ´_ゝ`）

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041543

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/hsn7kx/onyx_usin...

[2]: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?s=64718a04c...

> I've since sold the tablet and picked up a remarkable that I am very happy with and have modified in many ways.

Could you elaborate a bit more about the modifications you've done to the remarkable?

After looking at all these devices, I always come back to the remarkable, but then things like their cloud subscription thing and the weird ways to get files to/from it steer me away.

It's just linux under the hood and they give you root access. So you can install anything that you can compile, and you have access to all the compiled packages in entware [0].

For sync, I have wireguard and syncthing. For backups, I use rsync. For epubs, I have koreader. I even installed netsurf for fun, but I don't use it often. I was even using gocryptfs at one point, but that workflow kept breaking with updates so I stopped using that.

All of the tablets that I have seen perform handwriting recognition via a cloud service, so that doesn't interest me and I haven't come across any local solutions for rM (although it's been over a year since I last checked).

It's an unusually nice experience for such an open platform.

[0]: https://toltec-dev.org/

Ah TIL, thanks!

> and I have to dust off this old comment of mine

Do you really have to, crusader?

I have the same experience with a Onyx Boox. No more updates after 1 year. As (european) consumers rights require a working product for at least 2 years, and security updates are an essential part of a 'working product', it's easy to return it to the seller (not Onyx).

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