Wow, ok, what a self centered thing to say… Haven’t you thought about the money they wouldn’t be making then? They need all that money to protect the patents or otherwise the world would go down without innovation and also you would probably be killing art. And…
Actually I can’t. I mean not even with sarcasm I can make it into a joke. I think this is the first time sarcasm has failed me. I have made myself sad now. Fuck Rothschild and all the patent trolls.
I’ve been using calibre since around 2009 and it is an incredible piece of software. For handling ebooks, specially for eBook readers and file formats, it has no equal. Unfortunately it is built around the idea of installing it into one computer and connecting your eBook to it. Which makes it a bit clunky in my opinion nowadays.
Maybe calibre web fixes that, I need to check it one day. For actual books I think it falls between that and booklore.
All the other options seem to be more indicated to comics and manga, which is another aspect I’ve been noticing calibre does not do such a great job. I think I’ll have to keep two different ones, one for reading from a tablet comics and such and another for ebooks to send to the reader.
That looks like someone messed up the vector graphic icons. It doesn’t look like an AI problem.
No apologies needed, I’m not even OP :) it was just a long shot :D
Are you in Europe by any chance? :)
I mean, when google bought fitbit they already had you under their control. You were already part of their ecosystem and using a fitbit account didn’t mean anything really for your privacy. Now this feels more like an organizational cleanup. Trying to get rid slowly of the brand and make it more google centric, maybe force people to tie their data into their old google accounts to remove user duplication but really, the watches were already connected to phones with you google account most likely.
Either way, I’d recommend anyone interested in these devices to check the pebble brand. They got quite big back in the day, too big actually and they crashed. But they are coming back with really nice devices now (very long battery life too, screens always on that consume very little, and other features equally nice) and they have been open sourcing all their apps, os for the watch, and everything. Far more trust worthy than any other brand in my opinion. I’ve had a few of their watches and was heartbroken when I had to abandon them after their batteries were failing and had some issues. The thing is I got them in around 2015 and I was using them daily until 2 years ago and one is still going strong but the battery only lasts a few days (“only”, compared to the over 10 days I used to get). The garmin watch I got 2 years ago is started to get issues with the battery, lasts around 5 days now when it used to last around 12 at the beginning. The watch is nice but a bit disappointing in a few aspects like battery and clunkiness and the fact it is trying to be more than I need it to be (I don’t want GPS in the watch, maybe for some sportier people that like to go far without phones but not for my use).
What? The technology is not the problem. The devices are great in general and can help a lot of people. I don’t get this kind of thought process: “This tech doesn’t help me therefore it is useless for everyone you are just dumb for using it!”. For people with ADHD and other neurodivergence aspects this kind of device help plenty, and there’s plenty of other use cases out there aside of those.
The tech can provide a fully private and good service, but we need to make sure that companies cannot abuse their power which clearly right now it is an issue in most cases.
OP, check the pebble devices, they are bringing them back and they have always proven to be very good for any of us that used them. Now the devices are completely opensourced and even when the company went down all devices kept working. They are probably one of the few that can actually be trusted.
I hear ya, I used Nova for so many years, always trying other things but going back to it. And like you, I dropped it as soon as it got sold. But I struggled to find a good alternative. The most similar in usage and capabilities was lawnchair and I settled with it for a long while. Nearly all other options were too simple or lacked something I really wanted in a launcher (some quick gestures, proper folder handling…)
For the first time I have found a different approach to a launcher that I find genuinely useful aside of the Nova style.
But of course buddahriffic! Let’s see how I can explain it, it is quite a different approach to other more classical launchers. There’s no option to put icons on the launcher, there’s no paging or anything. In fact when I found it out it couldn’t even have widgets. But the Dev has been hard at work it seems and has been making really nice changes. Now it allows to use widgets, so at least you got that going. But otherwise the screen remains rather empty and clean.
Then the usage goes with gestures, but I’ve found it is less about gestures and just about straight lines of movement with your finger and how long. So when you start it it has nearly nothing set up to be used, you need to make a long click (I think it is like 3 seconds long and you see some UI feedback) to bring up the settings. In the settings you can see one of those screens with multiple rings in the screenshots on FDroid. On those rings you can manually and one by one add icons for apps or actions (and in the last version even more rings nested). You can set as many as you want, in as many rings as you feel like (maybe there’s some limits I don’t know). The customization options are quite nice, including distance to move the finger for each ring and area of no effect (if you want to cancel the action, I keep moving my finger in the screen quickly, browse the options in the rings and cancel it in the center where I started the gesture, it’s kinda satisfying, like a fidget thingy).
So in the home page, you can’t see the rings (maybe there’s an option for that) and wherever you press will set the center of the rings and then with the same gesture always you can reach the same action/app. The result is quite clean and easy interactions, once you learn your own setup. The apps I use less are a bit harder to find if I forget where I put them, but in those cases you can open a list of all apps just like any launcher. And at the beginning I was struggling to get used to it, but now I find it very convenient and fast for my most used apps. Getting the right place for the icons in the rings is also a bit of a learning process of where you want things.
Well, I hope I made it clearer and not more confusing :) maybe with the description and the screenshots in the app store you can get a pretty good idea of how it goes.
I’m enjoying a lot using Dragon Launcher, it’s a bit more complex with a bit of a learning curve but really nice once you get used to it. It’s less known so I’m trying to increase its visibility because it deserve all the love it can get.
I haven’t tried calibre-web, but has been on my long todo list for a while. If I’m not mistaken, it is not a better UI, it is a better UI for a web server, calibre’s web server is… Well, barebones. So it is meant to replace it when you want to access the library mostly remotely. That’s what I have understood, maybe I’m wrong so take it with a pinch of salt. The other comment had a link to an alternative open source free software library manager, might be worth checking it.
Not the OP you asked, but I back his comment fully. At this point, I don’t even know how long it has been that I have used calibre. I started when I bought a Chinese e-reader back in the day when it was that or the first kindle that had a full keyboard.
At this point, after so long, for me ebooks go hand in hand with calibre. Why choose calibre instead of that alternative? Habits probably, the fact that calibre has filled that role since I ever used a screen to read. I don’t particularly think there’s any other reason. Back in the day when the formats of ebooks were all over the place, the conversion abilities of calibre were priceless. Now everything seems to be epub or cbz for comics. The transfer to the reader was also a breeze with calibre, now with WiFi in every device it doesn’t feel so relevant. Not to mean calibre doesn’t help, it has moved with the times allowing remote direct connection with the readers and so on.
I use Calibre because I already know it, it is open source, and it has proven to work extremely well over all these years. It can be trusted.
But now with all that said, why I wouldn’t use calibre. Calibre comes with its own web server but sincerely it is sooo limited i just can’t stand it. I know there’s calibre-web but I haven’t gotten around to set it up. Plus it doesn’t get along well with calibre itself running if I have understood correctly. It seems where calibre is lacking is in the editing of a library from multiple sources. So its main use seems to be meant on one computer and… That’s it. Now that I am setting some self hosted services, I wanted something similar for calibre. Many times I want to edit the library from my phone when I want to add something I found or whatever. But I appreciate having the full app on my computer to do big complex operations on my libraries. But I’ve never loomed for an alternative, why would I, calibre is incredible… Well, maybe I should. Thanks for that link! It looks promising!
That’s awesome! And I can entirely relate but my ADHD / autism isn’t so bad I can’t keep a job, but now with hindsight if could choose career path again I would leave the tech world of computers to work with animals. Instead I keep working in tech to afford filling my house with animals (at least as I work remotely I can spend a lot of time with them). Dogs, cats, fish, snakes, amphibians, parrots, …
I’m conflicted, the brilliance and effort required for this answer is on par with how much I hate it.
Oh god mark this as NSFL please
I’ve been using lawnchair (which is a great substitute) ever since the news of the buyout from an ad company was announced, but that was a long time ago… Not sure why this is coming up now.
Anyway, a few days back I found out a new launcher and I want to spread the love for it. It requires more effort to configure it at first but I’m really liking its UX and the simplicity of the screen. It is called dragon launcher and I am having a nice time making small incremental changes to personalize it more and more and has been working great for me: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.elnix.dragonlauncher
I solved the daily #CluesBySam, Jan 15th 2026 (Tricky), in less than 8 minutes
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Awesome comment!
About the dashboards, I have been using CasaOS for a while now, it is not a OS, but it decently handles containers and allows you to install a bunch of services in a very user friendly way. Nowadays (as I found out a few days ago) the project seems to be moving in the direction of a fully purposed OS with NAS capabilities plus the containers stuff. Unfortunately the project (under the name ZimaOS) has gone into proprietary software and (for now) a one payment level to unlock full options with a free limited version.
I don’t think I can recommend anymore to go with casaOS due to that (although for now casaOS remains free OSS kinda separate). I have been also looking for alternatives to set up a NAS and so far I am heavily leaning on OMV as it is a full OS with the idea of handling a NAS with all ready, plus it is based in Debian which is a plus for me too. Alternatively I am looking into YunoHost also, but I think it is not exactly what I want, although it looks promising.
Edit: forgot to mention FreedomBox as another option that can work as a NAS OS of sorts that helps with self hosting services too.
Thanks for the feedback! I’ll definitely check it up as I try to build a NAS to deal with the extra storage needs.
Hmm so how does the workflow look like for you? Is the calibre web tied up to the DB of that calibre VNC? Do you manually add the books to calibre over the VNC? Then is calibre web allowed to make changes to the DB or does it have read only access? as far as I understand calibre is not recommended to have multiple sources of changes to the DB as it can end up corrupted or something? (At least it can’t resolve conflicts I think)
As a solution it seems like it could work, but it feels like over complicated to get around the limitations of calibre.