Was a Gnome user until Gnome 3.

Since Plasma 5, I use KDE Plasma.

I’m just going to share my unvarnished opinions here, I clearly understand that Gnome users feel differently, and that’s okay.

• Gnome 3 performance was objectively worse on every bit of hardware I tried than Plasma. (Unfortunately I had functional gripes with Plasma 4 so couldn’t use it.)
• The years of faffing about I had trying to be happy with Gnome 3 and trying to use other alternatives until Plasma 5 was ready pretty much convinced me of this:
  • Gnome devs care more about achieving their vision of how a desktop should be used than they do about accommodating users who might feel differently. This is my perception, and it’s a deeply held opinion. No matter how strongly you feel I’m wrong, you aren’t going to change my mind. You can come at me if you want, but it’s going to bear no fruit.
  • KDE devs have a vision, but place nearly equal importance on ensuring their users can make different choices if they choose. If this isn’t true, they do a damn good job of pretending it is, and that’s good enough for me. 🙂
• I’m unhappy with the degree to which it appears the Gnome team has actively worked against the ability for users to easily customize, and with various feature removals that at this point are so far in my past that I probably don’t remember the specific things that pissed me off, but I remember their explanations for feature removals being salt in an open wound every last time I cared enough to investigate their stated reasons.

Plasma 6 does everything I want the way I want. I have loaded it (and Plasma 5) on very low end and very high end hardware and found it performant and functional on both, consistently.

You’ll note I don’t claim it to be the best. There are folks out there for whom the Gnome vision happens to be how they like to work, or who aren’t bothered by whatever hoops you have to jump through currently to customize a Gnome environment, and I’m sincerely happy for those people. For them, Gnome is the best.

There are lots of other DEs and of course tiling WMs exist, but it takes me no time at all to have a fresh plasma install working the way I want my computer to work and looking the way I want it to look, and thus I literally have zero complaints. So for the past few years I haven’t even looked at any alternatives. If there’s ever a time that I don’t find the desktop product itself, and the KDE development team’s approach to desktop development, to be absolutely perfect fits for me, I’ll look elsewhere - but honestly probably not at Gnome.

Overdrive is the one I usually hear about, but in googling Libby it seems they are related.

https://help.libbyapp.com/en-us/6251.htm

https://help.kobo.com/hc/en-us/articles/4477058367895-About-the-Libby-app

https://help.kobo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017677053-Borrow-eBooks-from-the-public-library-using-your-Kobo-eReader

Well that does sound pretty cool, I might have to take a closer look when I’m ready for another purchase.

I’ve looked into those other brands but not recently enough to provide any meaningful comparison. (though I have this feeling that “remarkable is overpriced” is something I’ve heard a lot, but I could be wrong)

I’ve personally owned the Kobo Glo, Glo HD, and Libra 2.

For most of their devices (I can’t speak for current models one way or the other) you can swap out key bits of the software and enhance functionality via various hacks/mods. A lot of that is documented here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=223

You can also open them up and replace a standard SD card to boost storage capacity. (Again, I know this to be true at least through the Libra 2, I do not know about more recent models.)

The thing I got the most use from in the past was being able to swap out the sdcard on my Glo and Glo HD, but some folks really swear by the other various mods. I don’t have any complaint with the default reader software on the Kobo, so haven’t messed with swapping that out.

I have not messed with the SD card on the Libra 2 for two reasons - apparently doing so will mess up the waterproofing, and also because I’ve found 32GB to be sufficient for my purposes.

Kobo, folks. I’ve been there through three generations of devices. No regrets. Fairly hackable, sideload friendly, competitively priced.

I used Windows back then (edit - and MSDOS before that). There was already EEE as far back as Netscape Navigator and they are far from the only example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Then there is the whole “they stole from Apple who stole from Xerox” before that.

Essentially - at every juncture where MS has had competition, they have behaved poorly. “Linux is a cancer.” Sure thing, Ballmer.

Can’t trust Microsoft.

Always has been.

So in addition to the Boeing low hanging fruit - feels like the opener to a scifi story involving either covert space weapons testing or the start to some kind of extraterrestrial invasion. 😁

No one is listening I’m sorry to say. I corrected a couple people but then realized it was pointless. The discussions in the crossposted communities (which - holy shit I don’t think I’ve seen something so thoroughly spammed across multiple tech communities before) are just as bad or worse.

They have confirmed it was a packaging bug and will be resolved.

It’s just a packaging bug and they said they will fix it.

They literally posted that this is a packaging bug and will be resolved.

I live in a snowy climate and we did just fine before the invention of wireless starters. My car does not have one and we manage just fine.

That is a great QoL, but let’s not pretend this is necessary.

Yes, but we have had remote start without the internet for decades. It’s nothing but a cash grab. That’s what people are upset about here I think.

They took a feature that did not require the internet, then made it require the internet, for literally no purpose except:

But until, companies will push these hardware subscriptions because it nets them more money.

It’s one thing to withhold a feature. It’s another thing to overcomplicate a feature for the purpose of withholding it.

There is no need for the internet to use remote start

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Man, if “Microsoft is actively trying to take control of my hardware and prevent me from deciding how it is used” and “Linux has a learning curve and lacks market dominance to get hardware manufacturers to play with them sometimes” seem like equivalent circumstances to you, there is no number of iterations to this back and forth that are going to arrive at any common ground between you and I. I can only say good day to you.

Your statement suggest that if Windows is “trying to work against you” then Linux is “trying to work for you”.

That’s literally not what I said, nor what I implied. If you want to interpret it that way it’s your choice, but I’m not going to defend a statement I didn’t make and didn’t try to make.

You don’t escape that problem entirely in Linux, it just takes different forms. Proprietary vendor Linux hardware drivers would be a perfect example.

I feel like you aren’t distinguishing between “problem exists” and “problem exists because the makers of my OS want it to exist.”

So why hack Windows to make it do what you want?

I literally said this was NOT the question.