cutiepi-shell VS The-Open-Book

It's just a Pi running ARM64 Linux.

The default OS image that ships on the devices has their own touch UI shell which currently runs on EGLFS, which is basically an alternative to X or Wayland meant for embedded devices. So as it currently stands you can't run normal Linux apps in the default OS.

They're supposedly porting it to Wayland which will allow normal Linux applications to run within their custom shell. Their shell is a relatively straightforward Qt Quick application so it shouldn't take a huge amount of work to port. Though the most recent commit was a little over a year ago[1] so who knows when it'll actually get finished.

[1] https://github.com/cutiepi-io/cutiepi-shell/tree/wayland

Have you seen the "Open Book" project?

https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

Open book project https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

If you want to get all custom, you could build an e-reader https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-powered-open-source-ebook-reader

>I really wish I could have an e-reader, but again, I don't want to spend money on things that will lock me into a single vendor indefinitely and might just arbitrarily go away.

https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book

This may be up your alley.

It's not a commercial off the shelf product, but the Open Book uses a 4.2" screen. There are other devices you can find on places like AliBaba that are kinda small. However, in general you won't find a name brand commercial ereader under 6" that isn't ina phone body. There were a couple at 5" back-when but the industry really settled on 6" as the common base size.

This is very useful to see examples of how people have used APIs that are either poorly documented or not at all. Or even that are well documented, really. Going from docs to code is not always straightforward.

To give you just one example, recently I've been using it to find how people have written code to interface with e-ink displays. I usually have the datasheet which lists all the commands the protocol support, but building it all into a valid startup sequence of ~20 commands to activate the display is left as an exercise for the reader.

So the docs will look like this: https://www.waveshare.com/w/upload/6/6a/4.2inch-e-paper-spec...

And what I need is a sequence like this: https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book/blob/5c5054c58...

There is a link to the project early in the article: https://github.com/joeycastillo/The-Open-Book