While I don’t speak much and just browse lemmy, I fully agree with this post.

I updated the post with an official response

I updated the link with an unofficial response…

Citation of the first sentence from the link I posted: “Watchy is an open source eink watch, with open hardware and software”

It is painful, but it’s not all lost. First, the 2.0 watchy that can be bought on aliexpress is pretty good already and I’m not comfortable with posting this for I think obvious reasons, but I’m working on an ideal watchy for me: https://github.com/Szybet/Yatchy It won’t be a commercial product or anything, it will be just a perfect watchy for people who want something better than 2.0

The Watchy exists ;D

Look up your local 3d printer community

• The seller on aliexpress will probably have in the future usbc version with cnc case

My github has a repo explaining it all, username is the same.

The seller on aliexpress will probably have in the future usbc version with cnc case

SQFMI Watchy exists… And has a chinese supplier now which doesn’t suck

The community is also active, recently a few from ground up firmwares have appeared

Fully custom software

because it’s mainline kernel something is broken across kernel -> driver -> fbink -> qt platform plugin and it’s slow to draw things on screen. We are looking for solutions and have a few ideas already

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4387514#post4387514

Join our discord server for more up to date info on this

We have koreader which has dark mode

Both our software and koreader support it ( maybe an update would be needed, idk - easy to add )

Syncthing is a user app already

We have feathernotes which is simmilar to cherry notes - only usb keyboard tho

There is an experimental image for the clara hd but eink performance is not great. Maybe you could help with testing? Idk

Some kindles are locked up on cpu level for no reason - fuck amazon

Apart from that, nothing really. Most often people just start to port devices, we help them and one day they dissapear wasting our time and effort :(

3 devices are being currently ported, anyone who has a ereader can come in and try to port it. Only time is needed, we can help with the rest.

The only device that we couldn’t port was the first sony ereader because some weird cpu watchdog ressetted the device after boot - so our knowledge was limited on a complicated device

The device also needs kernel sources to be released for it, but kobo and kindle do release them ( sometimes after complaining ) so thats fine too

I’m not the creator but the only other person that contributes in a major way. “Second developer” as I like to call it

deleted by creator

We have netscape and midori browser but they arent great and you cant switch between them fast and reading.

A new rewrite for the current reader is on the go, it could improve on that

There is no minimum spec. It runs on a kobo mini 800 mhz 1 core cpu and 256MB of ram and lags a bit. On a kobo nia which has 1 Ghz 1 core 256 MB ram it’s fine

As I stated in the FAQ, even more performance could be traded for disk size, with a bigger sd card

I posted a deep dive in the original thread https://discuss.online/post/5399506

I, the second developer made it, but doom is old now. Now we watch youtube on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRqquXvsR1Q :D

I will add it to the FAQ

This is an OS, not an 3 party app for the stock OS. Why does it exist? ( In my opinion at least):

• It doesn’t reset the whole ereader for no reason, no ads, no forced updates ( The stock OS does )
• It has an app ecosystem, which won’t break after an update. We have many apps, some preinstalled some downloadable: https://github.com/Kobo-InkBox/user-applications
• The system is really hackable, for example: It has xorg ( It’s not super stable but yea ), an alpine rootfs so a package manager. I added USB support to it ( hot pluggable, which is not possible on the stock OS, if at all ): audio, mouse, keyboard: https://github.com/Szybet/niAudio
• I was interested in writing apps for my ereader. It was stupid for me that every app on the stock os ( Koreader, plato, Obenkyobo… ) has to implement their own sleep manager ( A developer in the community, Aramir still has nightmares after it ), wifi etc. Now InkBox and it’s background services manage that.
• It’s stable as hell: There is a recovery mode in which you can export the whole SD card over USB, enable on screen boot logs. The system is immutable which helped me many times.
• Once again, apps: We use musl and glibc so we are not limited by either one ( postmarketOS guys have problems running koreader because musl ). We also provide some ereader friendly libraries, a easy to use Qt toolchain ( I ported many Qt apps, with more or less success. The ones that are an official app are: feathernotes, rssguard, nachat, maps. The ones i gived up on: Marble, Okular )
• We fix things broken on the main OS: At least for my kobo nia I made the touchscreen a kernel module and reset it every sleep / wakeup to prevent a lockup which happened to me on the stock OS. It also sleeps now in and doesn’t wake up, so better battery life in sleep. On every wifi connection it synces time, it drifts a bit.

We have a reader up but it’s not great. A rewrite is ongoing, will finish this year for sure. It won’t be better than koreader for sure, we don’t have 200 developers but it uses Qt, which enables us to use better looking UI than simple menus like Koreader / Plato.

Oh did i mention we have koreader as a user app? you can use it ;)

it also enabled us to do some crazy things: https://youtu.be/hRqquXvsR1Q

Yes, most or many of those things could be done on the stock OS - but no one did it for a simple reason: you want to control things or there will be chaos.

As for now, InkBox is mostly an app launcher for me, but I really like it for it. No more stock OS resets :) For the average user? if you are not interested in those apps, in not hacking your ereader, not doing something unusual with it InkBox is probably not interesting for you. But if you use koreader anyway, dislike the stock OS and like open source, you are welcome.

We are also looking for contributors ( Rust / C++ or anything really ), this project has more potential than it seems

More questions appeared, I will update this message on the wiki: https://github.com/Kobo-InkBox/inkbox/wiki/FAQ

You can’t buy easily a 7 inch eink display with touchscren and backlight :(