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Originally Posted by Francois_C
Yes. First, if you never buy books from Kobo, which I took the habit of doing because (at least French ones) the first ebooks were so bad in 2011, you were able to put your books only on the memory card till version 2.5. This was a very handy feature: if you had to reset the device, you removed the card first, and books were parsed again when you restarted with the card in.
Since version 2.6, the card is no longer checked at start. You have to plug it again, books are badly parsed only when you plug the SD card and several plug/unplug cycles cause the card data to be damaged or Kobo database to be altered.
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That only affects the Touch. The Glo, Aura and Aura HD will all recognise the SD card when turning on. So, it's a bug, not Kobo trying to force you to buy books.
As to issues when ejecting the card, after two years with the Touch and a year with the Glo, I haven't seen this problem. And this is probably not as big an issue with the current firmware. Now, when the SD card is removed, all the books are not removed from the database. When the card is inserted again, the books on the card are compared with the database. Missing books are removed, new books added and changed books are removed and added as new. This seems to work well as I have ejected and inserted cards with about a 1000 books on them into both my Glo and Touch many times without any problems.
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Second, you have no choice of updating the firmware or not. I connected my Kobo to Kobo desktop after reverting to 2.4.0, only in order to activate my Kobo again. But the update began immediately, without letting me the ability of disconnecting my device before. So I decided to use the Linux validation with sqlite3.
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Yes, Kobo do not give you a choice about upgrading the firmware if you connect to the desktop app. It's rude, but I can understand their desire to only have to support one version of firmware. From my experience, needing to support multiple versions of software is an expensive thing to do.
But, I can't work out why you did that. If you want to downgrade the firmware, you should do a factory reset first. If you don't you will probably have problems. After the factory reset, you connect, let the Kobo desktop do its stuff including copying the new firmware files to the device. Then you remove the firmware files the desktop app put there and put the firmware files you want to use onto the device. This has been discussed many times here.
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Third, this misadventure made me experience the last firmware for some minutes. The display of the homepage was bad (text not centered at bottom, at least in French).
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Yes the menu at the bottom is left justified. Sort of like the menu that is at the top of any window in a current PC operating system.
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Several new features were introduced, links to things that are useless to me
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What links? The bottom menu is "Library", "Bookstore" and "Extras". Pretty much the same as for 2.4.0. If you are talking about the tiles, they change as you use the device. The things you use will will replace the defaults that Kobo display very quickly.
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and no longer to my recent readings.
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Yes, the tiled home screen is new and shows Kobo's defaults when first displayed. But, did you actually use it? Open a book and return to the home screen and guess what is in the top left. Open another book and return and guess what will be the first two tiles. Right now, I have five books, the web browser, a link to the library and the reading stats as the tiles. I can remove any of them whenever I want to. And strangely enough, Kobo have done this in such a way that I can easily fiddle with the database and prevent any tiles I don't want to see from appearing.
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I could not find any way to disable those stupid Reading Life features,
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It is at the bottom of the "Reading settings" page.
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I feared Facebook would invade my private life. Not to speak about Google Analytics which is always running and sending my reading statistics to Big Brother Google.
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How have these changed since 2.4.0? Actually, I'm pretty sure the Facebook thing has: there are less Facebook options in 3.1.1 than there were in 2.4.0. But, I don't have a Facebook account. This hasn't affected my use of the firmware at any version.
And for Google analytics, there is discussion here on the how to disable this from December 2011. That's a long time before 2.4.0 was released. I haven't seen anything more recent that suggests there has been a change since.
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I want to read independently for myself, not to be a zombie manipulated by the capitalistic system.
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In that case, turn the WiFi off. NOTHING will be reported anywhere. And as you are only reading sideloaded books, you don't need it.