Yeah, this is really not such a strength as people might think. I’m all for it being minimalist, and I wouldn’t want to have a web browser on mine. But the system is closed down way beyond what is reasonable. It runs Linux, and the only reason I can see to keep it closed down is that they want to sell their own cloud subscription.

I would love to synchronize files with Nextcloud. Should be easy to do, considering it’s a Linux device. But nope, it’s too locked down and there’s no way.

I have the keyboard attachment. It’s useless - I cannot edit plain text files, only their own restricted word-like format. At some point they even removed the option to email myself the text of the notes I had written, rendering whatever I wrote completely locked inside the device. And while the Linux shell of the device is accessible through SSH, I cannot change the keyboard layout without re-routing the driver which is some sort of deep black magic. So I’m stuck with QWERTY which is pretty much unusable for me.

Their cloud service forces you to pay a monthly subscription for some pretty basic features. Thankfully I get it for free as I had my account before they started charging for all that.

Reading the web sounds bad indeed, but it would be nice to be able to read the news on the device. It would be the perfect device for an RSS reader, had they not closed it down so forcefully.

Hell, if I could just access the terminal from the device I could use the keyboard attachment and SSH my way into my laptop, and I could do my writing work without having to stare at a screen all day. But the only way of accessing the terminal without jumping through a bunch of impossible hoops of third party hacks is through a computer using SSH. It would have been so easy for them to just make one available directly somewhere.

They do not have a linux app and there’s no nextcloud support, so I have to sign in to their web app every time I want to send a PDF to the device. And when I want it back to my computer I have to email it to myself.

Hell, I should be able to run Zotero on it and integrate it with my Zotero cloud. My Zotero library should be directly available on the Remarkable, and my annotations in documents should be synchronized. The Remarkable runs Linux, and Zotero supports Linux ARM. It would be easy to achieve, and would be an obvious benefit to a lot of users. But no, they insist on their own stupid solutions for no other reason than fucking over their users for money.

I use my Remarkable all the time. I wouldn’t want to be without it. But the stupidly restrictive system is not a feature, it’s a pain in the ass.