MudMan

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. 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.

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.

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.

Have I? I tried so many so quickly I can’t even remember.

In any case I’m part of the problem now, because my dealbreaker was having to organize my library in the obtuse alien way Calibre wants instead of the nice, human-readable way I already had. I bit that bullet, so now I’m married to a Calibre format library and thus perpetuating the terrible standard.

Hah. Good to know. I haven’t refreshed that container in a while and the data keeps populating just fine, so I hadn’t considered it. Makes a lot of sense to consolidate all the media server options into one package, though. I’ll take a peek at the new one.

I strongly recommend Overseerr if you are going to run a video server.

Forget piracy. I only host dumps of my physical media (which at least where I am is perfectly legal), but that thing has an database of international streaming soruces. I use it just as a watchlist and to check whether I have access to a thing on a commercial streaming service already. It is effectively Justwatch for your streaming media.

Immich is a pretty obvious thing, too, if you want to get out of commercial image hosting services.

I’d say, though, that’s a fairly ambitious plan, and if your self-hosted apps, your home webhosting and your NAS are all going to live on the same home server I’d certainly figure out security and backups before overcommitting. That plan is a lot of hard drives and failure points you’re gonna be wrangling.

I wish you didn’t have to do things the Calibre way to host ebooks, but whatever effort it takes to sort out ebook hosting must be a pain in the ass, because everything is built on top of Calibre despite Calibre being perhaps the most obtuse piece of “programmer-knows-better” software ever engineered.

Almost every other ebook self-hosted app is just a wrapper on top of that nonsense. I hate it.

You can try to use Komga instead, but it’s mostly meant for comic books and it’s kinda heavy, honestly.

It’s just nostalgia. The vast majority of those were either entirely devoid of content or entirely unusable.

Also, mostly Flash, so disqualified for human consumption by default.

It depends on what “crap” is involved specifically and your use case, I suppose.

I think it’s worth calling out that Win11 does indeed look extremely different depending on what settings you pick. Even out of the box my Win11 does not look like the mess a lot of the online advocacy likes to show. I’m guessing a bunch of the settings are saved to the MS account (which is again something people insist on considering anathema but I’ve used since before it was cool to hate it for several unrelated reasons).

Win11 has some quirks (where is my vertical dock, MS, it’s been years), some inexplicable technical flaws (how is your indexing so bad, MS, and why is the online search-enabled start menu so slow but the multisearch bar instant) and it is occassionally annoying to have to keep up with poorly communicated new features I don’t care about (what’s new screens, MS, they exist for a reason), but it’s mostly just… you know, Windows.

I’ll say this, if all my system partitions exploded today and I had to reinstall everything I’d definitely have an easier time getting back to where I was from scratch on my Windows devices/drives than on my Linux ones.

Any normal install of W11 can be cleaned up a fair bit just by manually refusing permissions and disabling unwanted features. For all the memes, very few of the features people complain about are forced on.

After that the biggest fixes I’d recommend are editing the registry to remove online search in the Start Menu, which makes it very workable (although there is a redesign incoming, not sure how that’ll interact) and installing PowerToys to get a universal search shortcut and a bunch of really nice QoL features.

W11 is actually perfectly usable after some customization, honestly.

It’s less the design itself and more that it makes the entire proposition seem like a flash game portal circa 2006, so it just screams “stay away” at unsafe volumes. It’s not even a bad drawing, it’s just branding the wrong thing at the wrong time.

It’s all just little text packets, this place included.

But hey, that’s all social media. The slight differences in threading, text limits, media embeds and share mechanics do matter.

Yeah, we had to stop giving my dog balls in the house because he’ll roll them under furniture on purpose and then whimper helplessly at the easily reachable ball-under-furniture until you get up and go “help” him get it back.

I have to assume he finds this fucking hilarious and fully appreciates the irony of making his human play fetch, but it’s all bulky plushies now, so joke’s on him.

See, my problem with these types of resources is if you have to list more than one thing per thing the landscape may not be there for a full replacement.

That’s not a hard rule, I do think some of these are a better first choice, or a better-for-some applications first choice. I’m just often frustrated by the way these things are communicated.

And DS9 is the conservative one with all the religion and the baseball and the war crimes and stuff.

TNG was run by a Frenchman who thought allowing bronze age species to believe in God was a barbaric act and went to bat as a human rights lawyer for an android who in turn let his first child pick their gender at will. All that while his polyamorous first officer was busy arguing against conversion therapy when pushed upon his trans nonbinary partner.