InkBox: a new open-source OS and eBook reader based on Qt5

[Anghirrim]

Originally Posted by elinkser

Your comment "keeping the development scene of our devices alive" - Koreader/Plato continuing to be developed, continuing to support devices, therefore keeping the development scene of our devices alive?

Ahhhh ok, thanks

[NiMa]

Originally Posted by pazos

I think you're being too pessimistic about the future of 3rd party addons on kobo.

There's no evidence whatsoever of kobo locking down the system to prevent 3rd party apps. Hell, kobo devices were not and are not meant to be secure by any metric. The are meant to be consumer commodities, who cares about it's security.

Rakuten as a company might care about their servers being hacked as everybody else. And should prevent their devices to be remotely exploited and its users data leaked. But there's no incentive for them to lockdown the userspace until Adobe requests it.

And, AFAIK, QuillOS is mostly a runtime, that would still work over stock bootloader and kernel. If you do some kernel patching to enable usb-host et al that's all that we will miss. The 99'9% of what the runtime provides would still be viable for those interested.

I think QuillOS is a pretty nice and fun project. It does provides a really awesome user experience for anybody that wants to run or port any app to their kobos. It's also an example on Qt platform abstraction.

Feel free to do whatever you want with your project, of course , but do not jump from the boat just yet, at least for this reason.

Try to have fun while we're waiting for the lockdown. If that happens I'm sure many will jump with you. I'm one of those

Thanks for your post, but sadly Quill OS has become much more than a runtime now. It's a complicated entanglement of multiple FUSE filesystems and kernel hacks, and the Qt interface is completely dependent on the host system for many things (sleeping/waking up, X11, user apps that use squashfs all over the place, etc.). There are also many security features that would become impossible to port to a device running the stock kernel, whether it would be because of incompatible modules or features or just the fact that it is not running on its own OS anymore.

Besides, the point of it is to be as open-source as possible and as independent as possible of the stock kernel/OS. I personally consider our reader app to be one of the worst ever programmed, even if I wrote it for the most part, and porting Quill as a NickelMenu extension would just not make sense to me, as KOReader and Plato are much better alternatives if you compare them to Quill just from a utility PoV. That's why, among other things, we have KOReader available as a user app for our own OS.

I hope I helped to clarify how I see the current situation... of course I would like to continue development, but it's hard to keep the motivation.

[Szybet]

Let me also add a few cents too

We have an alternative suspending process and daemon, which preserves battery better than the stock one. There is also a whole subsystem to make running apps easier and faster to port, for example the rssguard port I made doesn't have any suspend support, yet it works, it's managed externally.

Further more, I fixed many flaws of the nia A from the stock OS:
https://www.reddit.com/r/kobo/commen...mment/kt08f8n/

Also, I added support for USB keyboard, mouse and audio to Quill OS, you can find them by stalking my github

I could talk and talk what special features we added and personally used (One more: I modified the charging current from software to be better suited for using USB devices) which only show that Quill OS point was and is being a hackable platform, which was also stable to use with those hacks (No, nickel randomly made factory resets for me when trying to use koreader, it also made koreader slower over time - I tried to fix it before spending a year developing Quill OS, so no, it's was not a good experience for me, don't argue about it )

So no, it's not a runtime, it's mostly not the runtime, the runtime is the worst part of it, our reader sucks, it's the base and backend which made it special, hackable, usable

As for me, Yes, I'm pissed, I don't plan to go back to the project soon, I started to focus on a firmware for the Watchy: https://github.com/Szybet/InkWatchy and my hardware fork of it: https://github.com/Szybet/Yatchy