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Comment by Almondsetat | Hacker News Reader

The entire point of these devices is the tailored software experience, I don't know where your suggestion comes from

It comes from the fact that I'm tired of subscriptions, and some SW being "tailored made" is not always synonymous with very high quality. Community developed FOSS SW can sometimes be better quality and more functional than commercial SW.

For example I see KDE as being far superior than whatever Microsoft is doing now on the Windows desktop side, where one is free developed by the community and the other costs money and is tailor made by a trillion dollar corp.

Case in point, I had a Tolino(Kobo) ebook reader and the KOREADER PDF reader I sideloaded on it from github was way better than the tailor made one it shipped with. HW makers often suck at SW since their dev budget gets eaten away by the HW dev costs and they compensate by skipping on the SW dev side to keep their budget and profit margins in check.

Your examples are misinformed.

First of all, you are comparing two desktop environments that have been around for almost the same amount of time. KDE is extremely mature, both because of its age and its popularity. This is not the case with some niche e-ink products.

Secondly, you cannot even remotely compare the software needed for document rendering with the one for hand writing. The former is a very mature ecosystem and you can just write a UI on top of muPDF and port it to your platform to have a feature complete solution. The latter instead requires a wealth of expertise in how humans write and draw to develop both the drivers and the user land applications. Take the Librem phone or the PinePhone as exampleS. it took nothing to port Firefox or GIMP or DOOM to them, and yet the feel of their UI is terrible. Writing your PIN to unlock them lags, inputs are laggy, moving across the UI is slow and buggy. They are worse than the first iphone from almost 20 years ago, even though plenty of good developers have worked on them

Ah yeah, that gobshite pdf reader shipped with kobos is adobe's digital editions. Incredible ass jank with bad concept (it's for their DRM).

OTOH Kobo's Epub reader is very nice, if you convert your books to kepub – use callibre.

It's deeply fascinating to me that the company who invented PDF can suck so hard at making PDF readers.

Why is it fascinating they suck at it? That's what every monopoly does, rentseek. It's not that they can't do better, it's that's there's no incentive for them to do before. Kind of like Google and their search getting worse and worse.

I also have a Kobo, and I use Plato, created by the same person that made bspwm! It's great, and IMO a little easier to use than KOReader.

I do really like Plato for its superior performance and design, but it's lacking in features and documentation at this stage. KOReader feels like a flimsy hack written in lua, mainly because it is, but it does support SSH, two columns, grid view, more flexible gestures and extensions.

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