The hardware is easy for China, but there is a lot of software that doesn't exist yet, or it exists but is too slow to be usable. If you want to work on that software, then the pinenote is a great deal, order one and get busing writing/optimizing code. If you want a tablet that works the ReMarkable has been around for years.
I totally understand the "it’s just a notebook and nothing else" limitation. Like : ok, you can’t do anything else than using it as a notebook. Why not. It’s how it’s marketed and I bought it for that. My issues comes from the fact that it’s actually a really dumb notebook where it could have been a "better" notebook.
I mean, it’s 2024 and they still don’t allow you to create links between pages.
And the global ergonomics are pretty barebones too. Navigation is slow. Ok, it’s e-ink, e-ink is slow at rendering full pages. So maybe at least don’t make your UX be a succession of screens ? It’s like designers forgot that you can create interfaces that don’t require to redraw the entire screen between each action.
This thing is both a really beautiful and enjoyable object (the writing feeling is truly incredible) and a daily frustration of intentional limitations and laziness.
For example I see KDE as being far superior than whatever Microsoft is doing now on the Windows desktop side, where one is free developed by the community and the other costs money and is tailor made by a trillion dollar corp.
Case in point, I had a Tolino(Kobo) ebook reader and the KOREADER PDF reader I sideloaded on it from github was way better than the tailor made one it shipped with. HW makers often suck at SW since their dev budget gets eaten away by the HW dev costs and they compensate by skipping on the SW dev side to keep their budget and profit margins in check.
OTOH Kobo's Epub reader is very nice, if you convert your books to kepub – use callibre.
First of all, you are comparing two desktop environments that have been around for almost the same amount of time. KDE is extremely mature, both because of its age and its popularity. This is not the case with some niche e-ink products.
Secondly, you cannot even remotely compare the software needed for document rendering with the one for hand writing. The former is a very mature ecosystem and you can just write a UI on top of muPDF and port it to your platform to have a feature complete solution. The latter instead requires a wealth of expertise in how humans write and draw to develop both the drivers and the user land applications. Take the Librem phone or the PinePhone as exampleS. it took nothing to port Firefox or GIMP or DOOM to them, and yet the feel of their UI is terrible. Writing your PIN to unlock them lags, inputs are laggy, moving across the UI is slow and buggy. They are worse than the first iphone from almost 20 years ago, even though plenty of good developers have worked on them
I am also not a fan of the subscription model & pricing scheme but I guess that is how they want to pay back their investors. However, besides this they are (relatively speaking) also a pretty open company with a sizable community on github maitaning a lot of custom tools / applications. They do not provide official support for these modifications, but these tablets are definitely not locked-in like an ipad or impossible to tinker with because of obscure undocumented chinese hardware
I've been hoping to write my own now that the dust has settled, but it's definitely a MAJOR project yet to be done by the FOSS community.
For completely OSS, pine64 pinenote.
