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Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot better being done by Boox, and even with colour e-ink in terms of ghosting. I think a lot of that is software end, though.

The one unfortunate thing is that this monitor seems to have a glossy screen, not matte, but maybe that's an additional layer over a dev kit?

If this truly is 'open', then it should be trivial to write special X11/Wayland drivers for it, to handle a lot of the ghosting issues at that end. I think Boox actually refreshes portions of screens, and a double or triple video buffer in X/Wayland could do the same.

(One problem with Boox is their relentless phone-home to servers in China, which cannot be disable by normal means.)

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Another problem with Boox is the disregard of the requirements of the GPL family of licences. I've been interested in some of their devices but won't touch them due to that (and now due to the issue you stated - though I was unaware there was un-disablable “telemetry”, I'd have to look into that if they ever did something about the lack of GPL compliance).

they didn't, they even said something like "lol we don't care, we will never make things open source".

The dev kit works with most if not all eink panels. You are not limited to the panels shipped in this launch.

It is fully open, the full source code, gateware and hardware designs are on github: https://github.com/Modos-Labs/Glider

The screens included in these kits are glossy, however the board can support pretty much any screen up to 13”, including matte and flexible. On the ghosting - we’ve been thinking a lot about Wayland drivers and other software solutions. We’re working on an SDK that allows a compositor or other software to not just refresh portions of the screen but also change the display mode for certain portions as well.

Damn shame, because otherwise they look brilliant, I would have wanted one. Thanks for the warning.

boox devices are not even close to 75hz though

not even the latest ones like tab x c

Can you tell us more about the phoning home?

it's not much different than a samsung device phoning their servers for every thing the device does.

but in this case as it does to china, people are a bit paranoid. usually mostly is their cloud services for notetaking or some push notifications.

but I think I remember people saying they could disable everything by rooting the devices.

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