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 ;)
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
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):
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/hRqquXvsR1Q
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Nice very solid answer. I didn’t understand it was a replacement OS. Do you have a browser?
I’d love an e-reader with a browser. Nothing fancy, just something for looking up lore or related topics while reading.
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