[mdp]

Originally Posted by elementarythree

I was interested in a while in OLED screens but I haven't really found anything practical enough

If you have a mobile device with an OLED screen, and for some reason you benefit from using that for an alien Operating System, VNC can be straightforward enough.

Originally Posted by elementarythree

I was even thinking about a 6-7" eInk screen hooked to an ARM SBC

Where the effort becomes really interesting - where the range of applications increase - is with big screens. But one will also want them to be very portable - so the tablet form is great and should be exploited.

Originally Posted by elementarythree

I have the silvery one, I can just say that I like it. [...] I installed PRS+ on it and it brings a few goodies, like a calculator and ways of changing the fonts of ebooks to your own

I also "like" the PRS, but when we mention engineering effort and quality assurance, and commons sense and basic wits and "this is a joke, right?", the PRS has three font sizes, plus two very big ones. THREE, plus two, out of, say, the cardinality of a decently populated array from element "6" to element "72". It means that the people involved in the project were a mix of flatly-waved responsible for action and hunchmen responsible for inaction. And there is talk about the Chinese expertise in QA? I have the PRS+ firmware, and even that could not fix the font size selector... The hacker patched the problem in such a twisted, indirect way, as forced by the original mess, it definitely (really, not rhetorically) looks like the tracks of evolution on biological structures - just, as a difference, ineffective.
(And you are incidentally reminding me that only the custom firmware introduced the ability to upload fonts.)
This is why you want to avoid appliances: you cannot trust project teams. You want to have the actual freedom to fix their errors. That is my point. Dummyboy makes a branching loop, you did the best you could now let's see what we can do, Dummyboy makes a toaster, I want to be entitled to sue for moral damages. "As is" is very different from locked to unlocked.

Originally Posted by elementarythree

with eReader bigger isn't necessarily better, the Onyx is really uncomfortable to hold for me for long

That is a generic principle, it is valid for books: be it the "Little Book of Calm" or a leather-bound encyclopedia, a Polaroid or a framed canvas, surely through ventral brain's cybernetics + frontal brain's storytelling (plus the "wait a moment there" from sandwiched limbic) the reader will have prepared supports in terms of pillows, stands, lamarckianly evolved belly etc. Before the AR set, I used a sack to rest the book-holding arm during reading devoted walks.
You must mean that you read in the Onyx in public transport: well, give it some quality time, and exceptions will remain exceptions.

Originally Posted by elementarythree

Even the Asus Tinkerboard I have, (small SBC with the same SoC as the Max 2) doesn't get any Android updates and is already not safe to use on the internet with Android anymore [...] This is a problem with ARM devices in general and with Android in particular

I remained inattentive to the scene for a couple of years, but I remained with the notion that even Linux itself was faulted in the times when Linus was working abroad. (And what about the hardware?)
All small and big good reasons for airgapping the personal and distrusting the connected.

Originally Posted by elementarythree

You're way more optimistic than me there [...] I'd not be surprised if Onyx just silently stops pushing firmware updates for the Max 2

I only meant that functionality can be extended at Android's user level. I did not mean that the structural base can be improved. Unless they change policy and release a really open firmware.

Originally Posted by elementarythree

just expects everyone to buy The New Thing(tm)

Odd expectation, I unfortunately passed on these recent batches (Nova etc.), first time in five years. A niche market provider (EPD based tablets) and mass market policies (crippled hardware), I am not sure about the combination.

Originally Posted by elementarythree

These companies can't earn money with supporting old devices. I also doubt they'll ever unlock the bootloader or make it otherwise possible for people to gain control of the device. Stallman is right in decrying this kind of stuff, as weird as he is.

I think there is a problem of lack of quality oriented competition. For very many years, I have been checking in sets of uncountable products, in many paramount realms. The vast majority of them basically the same. All the cars but a few appear to be now Hyundai, under other logos. Matching the requirements, barely a handful of models out of a thousand - but through constraint relaxation. It is like there are Paretian patterns in products: the decent or appetible ones are deviations away, and paradoxically (given the flood of useless products) the total numbers are not even so big to allow that the optimal products effectively exist.