But it's great knowing that I _could_ drop down a layer at any time. It makes me feel a lot more comfortable about relying on an ecosystem to know that it has redundancy in the support layer. For example, if Remarkable themselves go out of business, will I still have access to my documents? Will they still receive updates? Will I still be able to buy replacement parts?
Both Linux installs were an 'it just works experience'.
The windows box has been a total pain in the ass and I've had to reinstall multiple times.
Linux is a better out of the box experience than Windows.
Excepting 4k, which is fine out of the box. the pain comes in if you need fractional scaling.
I started using Gentoo on my personal machines (Desktop, Laptop, NAS) after I needed to understand it for work. Eventually I fell in love with the developer workflow that it allows.
That was seven years ago. These days I feel like I've spent so much time tinkering for little to no benefit. I've been through LFS a few times so I don't feel that being a Gentoo user made me understand Linux any more than I already did.
So much "emerge --sync && emerge -1 sys-apps/portage && emerge -auUDN @world" and then fix USE flags problems and mask problems and keep rerunning the last command until it actually works.
I somewhat self host everything right now - VPN into my home network to access my NAS. But the user experience of documents and media just feels so poor compared to existing cloud services that I'm tempted to just give up on homelab stuff.
The upfront price of 10+ TB hard drives is hundreds of dollars a drive, you need to replace them every 5 years or so to "trust" them, you need redundant disks because you can never trust them, you need a backup solution, time investment to make backups, and the price of power in the Bay Area means you are spending several hundred a year on power to run the gear. Whereas I could just get 10 TB for $50/month from a cloud provider. It's not like I actually watch or listen to any of the blurays or music rips I've made, which represent most of my data...
I bought a PineNote in early 2022 hoping to replace my reMarkable. I've worn out the battery but I don't want to give money to a company that intentionally makes swapping the battery nearly impossible. Along with the fact they're useless at work because you can't directly use a cloud service, you have to proxy through reMarkable's own service.
I thought it'd be fun to tinker on but then I actually developed a healthy social life and exercise routine again and have found little motivation to stay inside when I'm not working.
Personally I completely agree with you, and could have written almost exactly that paragraph - I too have a ReMarkable (the 2nd / current version), and love using it as it ships for both note taking and especially for reading ebooks/PDFs ("especially" just because it's what I use it for more, not because that's what it's better at - in fact, its UI for reading documents is among its weaker points and I hope they improve it in future software updates).
However it is worth pointing out that you can SSH into it, and there are a fair few 3rd party tools and hacks for it - so far I've avoided trying any of them as there's nothing that I want strongly enough to have even a 1% risk of bricking it to worry about. But I'm tempted to start playing around with it someday.
This is the best list of stuff for the ReMarkable that I'm aware of, though I don't know how complete it is / how many released tools or guides there might be that aren't included here:
Not sure what problems you mean. Any reference?
That's why I switched to FreeBSD.
Every OS kernel update, every package upgrade just works. Rock Solid.
I have all that on NixOS. Things install and run reliably and configurations stick reliably, all declaratively.
1) Getting back to known-good from any fucking-with that breaks something is 1 rollback away.
2) It's still Nix wizardry to do something as relatively simple as set up a systemd background process that gongs on the hour (I actually made this work, but it broke recently and I don't know why yet because 2-year-old-son). This actually discourages "distracted hacking" while making you work for the changes you definitely want, which ends up being a nice compromise.
FWIW, I've been the most productive on this Linux distro of all the ones I've tried (Ubuntu, ElementaryOS, Pop_OS, Manjaro, Arch).
I've fucked with Gentoo and Arch for so long that sometimes I just want a break from it all. No dependency hell, no bugs, esoteric stack traces, nor popups, advertisements, notifications, nor distractions. Just some pen and paper, except without the eraser shavings or ink blots. Not having to scan your notes to digitize them is a nice bonus as well.
Especially since the pandemic and in the WFH era it's nice to get away from the omnipresent touchscreen or mouse and keyboard interfaces and deal with something a little more tactile; something reminiscent of a less perpetually online era. I'm tired of being hyperconnected to everything. Not to mention all the problems from staring at LED monitors all day long.
Sometimes I don't want to troubleshoot software; I've done enough of that already.