[sofixa]

There are alternative devices ( although the remarkables are considered to be among the best for note taking), each with their own drawbacks and advantages. For instance the Onyx Booxes come in different sizes, are full fledged Androids so you can install anything you want( so great for reading whatever), note taking is pretty good, but the company violates the GPL. The PineNote is open source and will run Linux, but development versions should come out later this year, so it's not exactly close to being ready.

So if you look around you'll probably find a similar device with the tradeoffs you're willing to make.