I feel your pain 😅🫠
Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don't translate perfectly.
Its true! I think the underlying Linux bones help with that. The one thing that moved me away from Kobo is the notes export limitations. You have to install a mod to get the functionality, then you can manually export them to a txt file in the home directory of the device. Its good, but not as flexible as it could be.
It kind of blows me away when ereader producers don't have deeply integrated and functional notes management systems, its such a big part of the device! I suspect it may be linked to vendor lock in though, each company wants you to stay with their services and so make it difficult to extract your notes 😕
Seriously. It seems like the subconscious anxieties and fears of the writer's mind come through in statements like this and a few others. Whatever positives (real and imagined) there are about the situation, there is an underlying loss of personal autonomy that causes a sense of unease. The thing that's continuing to intrigue me now is: did the writer intend for that to come through, showing the losses a society of that nature would sustain as a commentary on those that promote it, or are they unaware that their words reveal that distress and anxiety? Idk, weird article.
I started out (in recent years, previously had an old B&N Nook Simpletouch) with a Libra H2O. It was a well-made device, Kobo is a good company.
Currently I use a Boox Page (7 inch) for reading and a Boox Go (10.3 ich) for studying and notating.
Downside for Boox is the Chinese firmware that's basically a black box. The upside is they are the most flexible of any e-reader regarding self-hosting your own library and syncing across custom or personal services. I've been happy with the devices overall.
"Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me."
The consensus seems to be that this is a propaganda piece (or at least heavily opinionated by the writer) but I just don't understand how they could write this with a positive frame of mind. The article is a strange mixture of perspectives that don't seem consistent. Bizarre.
FOSS is a two sided coin: it's awesome that anyone with an interest can continue a project when the original maintainers disperse, but man you have to watch your software carefully for the most actively maintained forks. Thats happened to me on a bunch of apps: Breezy Weather, Paperless-ngx, Cromite, Ironfox, Simple Calendar and on and on 😂. It takes time, but it's worth it.
Try these two apps out. They'll help you remove deeply integrated stuff. If you don't need the Google Play store you can outright firewall it from internet access.
Heres a summary of the predictions made, from never all the way up to within the year. It seems to me the closer you get to the dollar bill the sooner the projections become.
"Some experts predict it will never happen..."
"Some experts argue that human intelligence is more multifaceted than what the current definition of AGI describes." (That AGI is not possible.)
"Most agree that AGI will arrive before the end of the 21st century."
"Some researchers who’ve studied the emergence of machine intelligence think that the singularity could occur within decades."
Current surveys of AI researchers are predicting AGI around 2040"
"Entrepreneurs are even more bullish, predicting it around ~2030"
"The CEO of Anthropic, who thinks we’re right on the threshold—give it about 12 more months or so."