That'd be me.
For the record, I disagree with nothing that Gerstmann is saying on this one, in case the more upbeat tone makes it more palatable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHrYhUOqZ7c
I just sound angrier because he's checking it out and seeing it moving in the right direction while I'm trying to main. All the speedbumps are actually annoying if you're not just tinkering for fun.
I absolutely don't understand Calibre at all. That's been my point all along.
I can tell you that I've actively tried to avoid Calibre when setting up a self-hosted ebook library and I'm currently chugging along with my Calibre-web install.
Turns out, somebody is forcing me to use Calibre, because I promise if I could have stuck with the half a dozen attempts at having a ebook library handle my pre-existing directory structure I wouldn't have wasted a day having Calibre ingesting and duplicating it all, then manually checking that everything came over before feeling safe enough to delete the original repository.
Because that's how it still works as of today, as it turns out.
And again, Calibre gets no more respect from me than... I don't know, Canva. I owe neither of them anything and if I happen to have a bad time using any part of it I feel super happy and safe sharing that on whatever venue seems applicable with as much sarcasm as I see fit. Software is software and end user criticism is end user criticism. I'm being exceedingly articulate and respectful about it, by those standards, speaking with full understanding of what the bad version of this looks and feels like.
Hah. I'm old enough to watch the norms play Street Fighter II The World Warrior.
All my joints ache. Even the ones you didn't know were joints.
I don't know how you walk into a store today and buy any OLED display without HDR. Every OLED panel I know of currently in production hits all the requirements.
For the record, the average gamer uses a Switch or a PS5 and a phone. The Switch 2 is moving fast, so the average gamer has HDR/VRR support across the board, or will very shortly if they're on Nintendo's ecosystem.
Nope. The entire point is I don't want an alternative, I want the one thing to work.
Hah. You get the "FOSS gets to be crap because you can't do it yourself" cop out often, but rarely when you haven't actually complained about it.
I mean, there are a ton of Calibre alternatives, the point everybody is making here is that a bunch of them don't get enough support or stick to Calibre conventions anyway because Calibre is at the ground floor of the entire thing and has sort of metastasized into a de facto standard architecture. I don't even know that you could make a commercial Kindle alternative and not at least support Calibre conventions at this point. It's like trying to not use HDMI anymore, and for similar reasons.
Unless you're Kovid Goyal (made me look that up and man, what a rough name to have in the 2020s), I don't see how that connects to your response at all. And even if you were, honestly. I've seen some of the other stuff the guy has done and said. I'm not sure he'd take it as an insult and I don't mean it as one. The man made the piece of software he needed the way he wanted, which is very much not universal. It just happens to now be the core of entire chunk of the ebook industry that isn't made by Amazon.com Inc., much to my annoyance.
But since I'm at it, if your software is annoying people have no need to hide their anger or contempt for the ways in which it is annoying, even if it's FOSS. If you put it out there don't be mad when end users act like end users. People who stumble upon a piece of software and try to use don't need to do an audit on your accounts and licenses to know if they are allowed to be mad at the stuff that's annoying them. FOSS competes with commercial software in equal terms, as far as end users are concerned. Some of the ways it competes have to do with privacy, security, code access and lack of fees, but all the other ways, including UX, polish and feature set, still apply.
I know how flatpaks are updated, thanks a bunch. Not that it matters particularly on Bazzite these days, because Bazaar will do that for you on the gui, too. Gear Lever will handle your appimages, if you're lucky. We could have a conversation about how much sense it makes to have updates happen in four different places and how much sense it makes to advise people to stop using their pre-bundled "update everything" script and start updating each of those separately to avoid a troublesome updated driver as a permanent solution.
In any case that's not the only part of your software that comes with a system update. The list of end-of-life features and warnings I see reported on OS updates has been steadily growing as my install ages, which has been interesting to see simmer, given all the "it's foolproof" talk about immutable/atomic distros on the internet. I have to assume some of those will get sorted out in future updates, but so far the list has been moving in the wrong direction.
Honestly, when I do have the time and motivation I will likely just rebase to a whole different branch and go from there depending on what fixes itself or breaks. I assume that will get rid of a bunch of stuff.
But that's already waaay past what an average user should have to do to their OS. Especially in the time this install has been live without a rollback or rebase (and it's had some, because it's not the first time it breaks). I'm not even sure Bazzite shipped a broken update. It could just be an issue on KDE's side. Or on Nvidia's side. Who knows. Being able to roll back my system to a point where it worked is not a fix, it's a troubleshooting step. Having to troubleshoot IS the problem in itself.
I mean, unless you broke something yourself, I suppose. But you're also supposed to not be able to do that in an atomic distro, if you believe what people will tell you.
For the record, as I told someone else, I didn't choose Bazzite because it was an atomic distro (in fact it's kind of a pain in the ass that it is, KDE really doesn't like it when you try to customize stuff in one of those and doesn't handle it gracefully at all). I chose it because I had a hell of a time finding a distro that would pick up my sound hardware properly (sound on Linux is yet another rabbit hole) and still have proper HDR and VRR support with my display setup. The list of distros that did not do both of those things at once before I landed on Bazzite includes Manjaro, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora Workstation and a couple of others I didn't test for long enough to remember.
That's a lie. Manjaro aaaalmost got there. It worked for a while. I kinda forget what broke that made me try something else.
You can see how that entire ordeal is... not mainstream-friendly in aggregate, though, surely.
To boot into a semi-functional but not updated Bazzite, probably. Takes 5 to get to Windows, though.
To get my system up to full functionality and up to date... their history with massive, feature-breaking issues, and they do have one, is maybe a couple of weeks for a patch and then some time seeing what the fallout of the broken stuff is around your software in general.
Although that's on a good day. Bluetooth has been entirely nonfunctional on this Bazzite install for months and going by how long ago people have been mentioning it with this specific hardware I don't think that one is going away anytime soon.
Nah, hard disagree. Calibre has quirks because it's old, but it also has quirks because it has quirks.
It's not particularly disputed that a lot of how its original pre-web UX was designed and the weirdly rigid, stunted structure of how it wants its libraries organized are a side effect of it originally being a one person project that seemed mostly designed to the preferences of its maintainer. And then there's all that baseline functionality from it being originally meant as a standalone app rather than a self-hosting thing layered on top of all the weird decisions.
I've been at this for a long time. I tried to use Calibre back when it was new, digital comic books were rars with jpegs in them and ebooks just sat in random directories as .txt files. It was weird then and it's weird now. If anything, the crazy ecosystem built around it has made it less weird now that a bunch of stuff is hiding the rough edges behind more modern/reasonable design.
FFS. I mentioned G Sync because they have a logo. VRR is so common an ubiquitous that there is a VESA certification for it now and a default standard for it for both HDMI and Display Port, no Nvidia required. It doesn't matter if you have G Sync, AMD's Freesync (which is an open standard) and can be used by any brand of GPU or generic VRR, it. Nvidia gave up on their proprietary Gsync hardware.
You having had your head in a hole about what the average display features are in 2026 for even an entry level gaming display doesn't mean they aren't common, important or widely supported. When Nintendo has adopted a universal technology and you haven't you know you're behind the tech curve.
For the record, plenty of Linux distros have full support for HDR and VRR. Mint just happens to... not.
There's a reason Calibre-web is called Calibre-web. Calibre-web itself is a mitigation for how dumb Calibre is.
A lot of a very cool ecosystem is built on top of this one core piece of weirdness this one nerd made in his own alien mindspace and nobody likes any of the choices in there, but it's inescapable now, precisely because all these other cool, important tools are built around it.
See also: Gnome.
I can't believe I walked into this comment one hour after it was made in a 9 month old zombie thread. I haven't even opened this app in days.
Anyway, I do think it's funny that you said Morrowind when I was comparing it to Oblivion, because it just goes to make my point: this is about age and where specifically you set the focus of your nostalgia goggles.
You give the jank and smaller scope and jank of Morrowind a pass because it's weird and was advanced at the time, but probably think Oblivion traded visuals for a more boring setting and truncated world, which was the criticism at the time. I think Daggerfall was doing some crazy sci-fi stuff in 1996 and just making a console RPG was a step back for Morrowind, which was the criticism at the time, and I bet plenty of people are more than happy to be nostalgic about Oblivion. People tend to think stuff holds up depending on how into it they were when it came out.