[WhyNotHugo]

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.

[torben-friis]

What custom software could you possibly want in an e-reader?

Like, in my mind is about as dumb as an electronic device gets. Load epubs, a few options for font size and margins, you're done forever.

[WhyNotHugo]

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.