A tale as old as time with OSS software from what I've seen. So far the only exception that I've seen of a FOSS piece of software with great UX is Blender[1]. With UX not being a first-class citizen on Linux, exposure to a solid universal tooling to create great UX also exacerbates things.
I think the issue of bad UX and OSS are comorbid because good UX needs an extremely opinionated mind at the helm and a culture of prioritizing features and saying "No, this is not important" which OSS generally lacks.
Most OSS software favors power users instead of total beginners. And even Blender is not a great exercise in discoverability. You need training to use it.
The stock software in Kobo and kindle can be used within minutes because they don't have a lot of features/options. And it's totally fine if that's what you need. Just like Windows 7's Notepad. But if you need more capabilities, your wish is notepad++/vim level (which does require more learning), which is what koreader is.
OSS software aligns mentally with "tool". It only exists because someone had a problem to solve, and they wanted a tool to solve it. Generally, people should expect to have to learn how to use tools. Then they solve their problem and move on. It takes effort, and the result is mastery which gives you new capabilities.
Consumer software (and especially anything ad supported or social media adjacent, and sadly in many respects, lots of modern SaaS companies) want to be as glitzy and smooth as possible, but they don't actually want you to solve your problem. Instead they'd really prefer that you simply spend as much time looking at their software as possible. So the experience can be quite pleasant, it feels nice, things feel obvious, you get the dopamine hits quick and fast. But after a while you realize you aren't actually all that productive (or even productive at all) when engaging with them. Because the goal of this software isn't to help you solve your problem. The goal is to keep your attention and extract your money. If it happens to solve your problem... sometimes that's fine, sometimes that's actually counter to the primary mission of extracting your time and money.
This requires however to remember the name of the command (or parts of it). I often remember that but not where to find it or the shortcut.
It also requires that you chose the spacebar search option, which is the only correct option if you ask me. (Not a pro. Just messing around with blender sometimes.)
I think it’s more subtle than that. I am a power user — I was compiling my Linux kernel in the 90s, I wrote my own SSH tunnel manager 20 years ago, I always fiddle with settings, etc. etc.
However, I am constantly frustrated with a lot of OSS software because it expects you to think like the developer of the tool, instead of having empathy for the user. What feels obvious to the developer of the tool (I am making up a hopefully-representative hypothetical here, but finding the change of font under “Theme” because it’s how “it looks” but finding the font size under “View” because, well, you view it) feels frustrating and nonsensical to a normal human who relates both the font and its size the same way in their mind. Again, generally — I’m making generalizations here and not calling out any specific software, but trying to illustrate the feeling that I get.
When I switched to the Mac in 2002, it is because these sorts of things made sense. Yes, there were and are frustrations because of this sort of opinionated design mentality, but I judged the benefits to outweigh the positives. Unfortunately, Apple squandered this culture and skill and nowadays I often find the platform as frustrating as OSS ones, to the point where I have switched back to 50/50 time split between platforms.
Afaik koreader itself does not support stylus while the default reader in kobo does (somebody made a plugin lately but not sure how stable it is). Not to say that koreader is not amazing, but it does not mean that FOSS always has strictly more features. If koreader had strictly more features and I wanted some of them I would choose that. But I also right now want to use the ereader to read books and take notes, not tweak plugins and configurations. I have been in this "power user" loop where I spend more time with configuring rather than doing the thing, and I am a bit more selective with when this makes sense to me.
Notepad++ and similar having forever tabs you don't have to explicitly close is cool but I ran programs like that when I wanted that...
I think UX is simply harder when you're not leading the user by the nose to your most profitable features, and removing or obscuring the others. Commercial UX is more akin to advertising than UX, so there's no wonder that it makes very clear the few affordances that it offers (and bizarre when it doesn't, like the "flat" period.)
The other problem with FOSS UX is that millions of dollars haven't been put into it (literally: 5 developers = 1 million dollars/year.) The wonderful benefit of FOSS UX is that you have plenty of time to learn it, because every feature is already there, no one is forcing you to upgrade, and no one is moving things around and deleting things because it is more profitable to them.
Commercial UX had better be good enough to learn basic functionality quickly, because it's going to be completely recycled every year. It also doesn't want you to learn anything too deeply, because then you might become a (gasp) "power user" and make unprofitable demands.
Imagine using the same type of software (e.g. an mp3 player) for a couple dozen years and thinking that it's a hassle to figure out how to learn it. Imagine being boiled like a frog to relearn how your mp3 player works every couple years for a couple dozen years, and dreaming you've saved some sort of time or effort. Imagine you've used mp3 players for a couple dozen years, you still don't know what an mp3 is, you don't know what a file is, and you don't know how to get your mp3s back after switching your mp3 player without rebuying them. Eventually you switch to streaming, give up making any decisions, and take whatever the marketers prefer.
This is "good" UX.
I think Libreoffice is easier to navigate than ribbon-era Office.
I think especially Gnome, but also Kde has better settings than Windows, which is spread across a new and a classical view (or more?).
I also think MacOS finder is worse than Windows/KDE/Gnome equivalents. When you strip so much away that people have to remember strange key combinations to jump/navigate to specific directories you have really gone too far.
And mobile UX (android and iphone) seem to me worse than any desktop system. Nothing is consistent (sharing data between apps), nothing ever seems settled (settings move around in the central settings apps every few releases).
We could argue in depth. Let me head it off a bit - taste is absolutely a thing, but consistency across releases is evidently a good thing unless you are constantly in a situation where your existing userbase is dwarfed by the prospective one. There’s a reason we hang on to diskette icons, don’t change from desktop to metro to ios style desktops every release and so on.
Last point: OSS software can be misguided, but it never seeks to bamboozle the user to make some corporate goal succeed. It won’t nefariously stuff files on a cloud or actively make it hard to export data or be incentivized to NOT interoperate with devices or programs shipped by competitors.
A few people are suggesting that KOReader is symptomatic if the issues with open source software. The reality is it targets a particular group of users.
If you're working at just the most basic level of functionality, I don't think KOReader is necessarily worse than native Kindle. The latter is hampered by being very opinionated about how you should experience it, and that includes pushing their store above the user's own library, and this is a real annoyance.
As you start to demand more capabilities they diverge more. Organizing when you've got many books on the device is clunky on both platforms, but in different ways. The native Kindle options for grouping are simple, but not necessarily easy. They're very generic, and very cumbersome to work with. Bare KOReader's support for folders makes more sense to me, and it's easier to deal with bulk books than is Kindle's.
Getting books onto Kindle is super-easy if you get them from Amazon, but complexity ramps up for other sources. Your best bet is plugging it into USB and transferring via the file system. Native KOReader add to this an OPDS capability (if your book repository supports it), which works but is less than pleasant. If you use BookOrbit as your repository, there's a plugin that gives you the remote BookOrbit UI from the Kindle, which makes things a LOT better.
I experimented with Simply UI for a bit but could never get it to work quite right. About a month ago I found Bookshelf, and this makes the UX pretty wonderful. It has a very attractive and intuitive UI. And it simplifies the interactions needed for group management a bit.
Bottom line is that KOReader + Bookshelf are, for at least a power user, a potentially far superior experience compared to baseline Kindle.
As far as I can tell, the workaround for this is sensible defaults or maybe a setup wizard on first run.
I think this boils down to profit not being the only driving force for these companies, but prestige and a sense of duty and responsibility towards something larger and less immediate.
Software Japan
Wouldn't wanna live there permanently. Wouldn't want to have been born Japanese. But my god the products and services are head and shoulders above my baseline expectations; it's simply nicer.
> Wouldn't wanna live there permanently. Wouldn't want to have been born Japanese.
So I take it you understand that there is no free lunch.
I also understand why it’s not something common outside of Japan. Selling your family name in exchange for (maybe) keeping your business alive is distasteful at best.
You're assuming long lasting soy sauce companies have anything to do with software development. Japan produces great video games despite how terrible otherwise the developer environment and culture is there and nearly all of the other software shows it.
What? It can’t even maintain a stable 30fps on its own target hardware. That’s not an example is point to for something running “well.”
> Software was not viewed so much as a product, but more like a service, similar to integration, training, and ongoing support and maintenance. It was usually sold on a time-and-materials basis, and sometimes it was just thrown in for free to sweeten the deal. The real money was in the hardware.
> Software development was considered rather low-skill work. It didn’t pay well and was viewed as a kind of clerical work. The job was simply to write software that was close enough to whatever sales had promised the client while they were out drinking last week.
> Being able to put epubs bought elsewhere
I'd say it is in this case.
Standard Ebooks for high quality public domain books, though they also offer azw.
There are a number of other free ebook sites out there as well.
If you copy an epub to the device over USB it won't work. The kindle itself does not support epub.
- Format support: EPUB, CBR/CBZ (comics, graphic novels), PDF
- Dark mode
- Fully programmable gestures and shortcuts
- Automatically syncs with my readeck instance (think readitlater/instapaper) to dowload the articles I save for example here on HN
- Calibre integration over wifi
- RSS/Atom
- Custom dictionaries
If you are into manga, there is an extension for directly downloading them on the device
I'm really happy I made the switch.
The reason I use koreader is because it can sync my progress on disparate devices. I have a normal sized kobo and also a phone sized viwoods eink device.
But indeed it's a feature I cherish.
(I suppose I'm not supposed to feel complimented by the term 'engineer'? I'm not trained/experienced in any engineering discipline, not even software engineering.)
I thought perhaps you had a non-eink ereader and were equating eink screens with ereaders. Apologies.
- Customise any/everything. Font size, line spacing, paragraph spacing, margins, header/footer content, the list goes on
- Ability to use things like BookOrbit (or alternatives) to manage your books and sync your progress/stats.
- LLM-integration through plugins like KOAssistant, highlight a word/phrase/passage to get it explained to you. This was invaluable for me when reading through a series from the 1950's about the late 1700's, lots of phrases I'd never heard. Many I could grasp the meaning from context but it was way more fun to hear the "why" behind the phrase. Same with historical events that I am less knowledgeable about than I wish. Let's me stay "in the book" instead of picking up my phone.
- Full control, some people don't care/need this but I love being able to SSH into my Kindle and do whatever I want. I love having my entire book reading experience end-to-end be fully open source and self-hosted.
I see it supports audiobooks and ebooks. Do you know if there is any way for keeping sync between an audiobook and ebook?
For my Audiobooks I don't use BookOrbit because my setup is:
- Buy on Audible
- Rip DRM off
- Add to Plex
- Use Prologue (iOS only) to listen
And I freaking love that setup so I'm not looking to replace it currently.
I discovered BookOrbit about two months ago. I think that it, together with the KOReader plugin that exposes the remote BO UI, may turn out to be a game changer in how I organize and access my ebook repository.
- Allowing to highlight text across pages. Used to work in the past but no longer works
- Allowing exit to library from mobi files without a cold reboot of the device. Used to work, no longer works.
- Not deleting contents of my library on an update overnight? (files still on disk, metadata gone, no longer visible on Kindle)
- consistently working dictionary, offline, at least for English texts? (used to mostly work, with recent updates it is broken)
- Not getting worse on every update
- Better keyboard layout, maybe supporting smaller languages
- Not deleting purchased books remotely
- better bookmarks and navigation support. I find Kindle useless for the technical reading and learning materials, as navigation and cross-referencing is slow clunky and useless, I need paper books for that, or a computer.
- Better image display? Also hinders proper use for digesting technical content.
- Text Search?
- EPUB support.
There's obviously a lot you need to provide yourself that Amazon gives "for free" with the Kindle ecosystem, but using koreader with OPDS and kosync for synchronizing progress across devices, I'm very happy to be just buying DRM-free books elsewhere and hosting a small OPDS+kosync server on my home server. Installing tailscale on my kindle makes it so I can even fetch books/sync progress when I'm away from home without needing to expose my book server to the internet.