What software do you use on the device itself? I recently got a Kobo Clara HD, but software support seems to be a big issue.
On one hand, there's folks using the vendor's OS, which looks like an abandoned custom-made Linux distro, where compiling anything is a nightmare. It's not really made to be hackable, but just to read books purchased via their partners.
OTOH, there's a near-mainline kernel, which works nicely, and hacking on the device becomes much nicer, but e-reader-oriented software seems to commonly rely on kernel APIs only present in the vendor's abandoned fork, and won't work on a more mainline Linux. But this is a great target for actually developing stuff.
I'm tempted to write my own minimal e-reader-focused DE, but honestly, I don't want another project on my hands and would like to use something that's already there.
I want to use it mostly to offload reading web articles (or RFCs) onto it, so I want a simple pipeline on my desktop that renders a web page into something e-reader friendly, and then sends it to the reader. I'm using something like Mozilla's readability to extract the article itself.
I don't intend to use the e-reader to displace paper books, I have no quarrel with those. I mostly want to displace "sitting on my desk, reading a multi-page article on a computer monitor".
It's custom software but still pretty dumb, doing most of its work in the background.
On one hand, there's folks using the vendor's OS, which looks like an abandoned custom-made Linux distro, where compiling anything is a nightmare. It's not really made to be hackable, but just to read books purchased via their partners.
OTOH, there's a near-mainline kernel, which works nicely, and hacking on the device becomes much nicer, but e-reader-oriented software seems to commonly rely on kernel APIs only present in the vendor's abandoned fork, and won't work on a more mainline Linux. But this is a great target for actually developing stuff.
I'm tempted to write my own minimal e-reader-focused DE, but honestly, I don't want another project on my hands and would like to use something that's already there.