[christopher22]

So, been a while. Here's an update. Hadn't logged in with one of my old kobo's in a while and it was at 1.9. Side loaded the 3.11 tgz file .. I think David mentioned that if you didn't like the 4. releases to go with 3.19. I suppose I should have done that. Regardless I went with 3.11 but then of course it asked me to register which required a wifi connection. So I went ahead and connected and watched helplessly as it updated automatically to 4.24 (might have been 4.23 but pretty sure it was 4.24).
First thoughts of 4.24 - don't like it. The start up screen is rid of the happy kobo - kind of like that and it's got 3 increasing dots 1,2,3 1,2,3 as it loads - I'll have to say takes much longer to load, and of course I don't like the home screen. Of course there is no zoom magnifier for epubs (one epub I had was the wrong size so the only way around that was to convert the epub to pdf format so I could view the entire page, not ideal but it worked. Or I guess could have just renamed the .epub to .kepub.epub and that may have worked (I'll experiment later).

So now that's it's registered you can easily roll back the firmware by dropping in an older firmware KoboRoot.tgz file into the .kobo directory as mentioned earlier. It automatically updates to the older firmware, but you don't have to register again during a rollback. Couple of issues I ran into, which I fixed and will detail in a moment, it took much longer to load and some previous info from 4.24 still existed which froze the kobo when I checked it, also clicking details of a book it froze. So I fixed that by connecting to the computer and deleting some folders that didn't exist in 3.11, mainly the folder `custom-dict`, `dropbox`, and `guide` but they were empty deleted them anyways. The main reason was a second sqlite file called Bookreader.sqlite, so I deleted that file and all was good again, actually I'm pretty sure that second sqlite file was the reason for all the freezing and timing issues (I probably could have left the empty folders and it would have been fine).

I do like the 3.11 - just use it for pure sideloading. Not sure if I'd notice a difference with 3.19 - might give it a shot but 3.11 has been good for me. Lots of new users out there but I wonder if any of them wish the new kobos had a micro sd card slot?