e-readers

[Amlux]

I'm making this thread to announce my pleasure at having acquired a Rakuten Kobo Clara BW reader. I had been running an Amazon Kindle (or Amazon Swindle as we should be calling it!) which is one of the most obscene pieces of technology I've ever seen. This piece of shit shows you ads on the lock screen! I can't believe that something this obnoxious could exist. I managed to do some backdoor loopholes to remove this function, but it keeps reappearing when the thing "auto updates" and the like. So I figured, fuck it, I just don't want to deal with an Amazon product anymore. Good riddance.

Does anyone have experience running an alternative OS for a Kobo like Quill OS? I've heard these can have better display options for PDFs and the like. And this is important for me. But I also don't want to do anything radical before understanding my options.

[Alrune]

I don't know much about QuillOS, but I just use a Kobo Clara with KoReader installed. It handles pdf and everything else very nicely. Very simple to install too.

If you have a smartphone and you want to test it out first, you can just download it off fdroid.

[zen]

Not directly addressing the OP question but continuing the topic regardless:

I got a "free" Samsung/Android tablet when I bought my wife her newest phone and I mostly use ReadEra with epub on it. It works at least as well as my old e-paper nook and kindles of past times; maybe it doesn't work so well outdoors but I don't exactly do a lot of reading in the park. Epub rules!

You should really be reading epub as much as possible unless another format really makes the most sense. Kobo natively supports epub and standardebooks / libgen are great places to find epub files for free. When I do have to browse PDFs for things like textbooks or books without epub versions, the Android tablet renders them at least as well as a desktop computer would -- so I can vouch for that.

Aside from heavily layout dependent texts like textbooks, PDFs are only good for one thing, printing. As a tangent, if you can find it in your money/time budget, I highly recommend making physical copies of worthy books. It feels so nice to have a library you made yourself.