The surface tablets work just ok with Linux, depending on which one you use. I used a surface go for a few years and it was mostly ok but definitely had some pretty major glitches, and as far as I understand they’re pretty unfriendly for repairs or upgrades. The go (gen 1) I had was a touch small screen wise but I think the bezels got smaller so it might be better now.

Yeah, definitely think there are use cases for this (look at how popular the xeink X4 has gotten), but a device smaller in most dimensions than modern smartphones isn’t gonna make a good general purpose ereader for many people

Curious why that year? You have to go much older to predate any surveillance tech. Like some cars in the 90s had GPSs embedded, not sure when the ability to offload data arose but no later than 2007 in OnStar equiped vehicles.

So sick, huge props. Will have to test this out once I have time to (a) find and dig out my old Wii stuff, and (b) set this up

Supernote is an eNotebook and is writing focused rather than book focused, but it uses a stripped down fork of android and you can easily side load other android apps onto it including e.g. F-droid. You can use it without an account and with no network connectivity (loading content via USB), or your choice of cloud providers, including recently self-hosted storage.

I mostly read library books so unfortunately I have to go through Kindle, but you can use the Kindle app on the device and it works pretty well. Not as many features as a dedicated device, but the basics work great.

Major caveat: it’s not backlit so you need a book light/lamp/headlamp, which is a big pain.

I think machine compatibility plays a huge role, some machines do mostly ‘just work’ while others are a pain. It also definitely requires some tinkering, though mostly on setup or on the first week or two in my experience.

Also, ymmv and a lot of people swear by them but I’ve never had good luck with Ubuntu based distro, they’ve always been super buggy with hard to track fixes for me. I like fedora a lot better and it similarly has decent (though not nearly as extensive) community support for weird bugs, but I know people swear by many things.