The GP has a point. The Linux desktop went nowhere. 40K desktops in Spain, 14K in Munich and 90K by the French police are by themselves respectable numbers. But when you take the perspective that:

• -- these are the 3 biggest deployments of (desktop) Linux within the whole European Union public services,
• -- AFAIK the only 3 very large ones,
• -- in 2012

  one needs to reckon that, yes, we may all use Linux at home and some even at work (I do) but the Linux desktop never made it anywhere close mass market presence.

If I want to buy a high-quality laptop withOUT paying for an OS license that I am not going to use, the situation is as dire today as it was 10 years ago.

What you call the bare minimum, is still -for me- leagues better than the current alternatives. At the end of the day, the Kindle gives me standard font-types with great legibility, most LaTeX produced stuff I read on my Kindle DX (PDFs fit just right) use Computer Modern fonts - which suck for screen reading.

FWIW, regarding your linked image:

1. the font size in the image you linked is too large for the screen size. Reading a novel at ~ 6 words per line is going to suck no matter what. There is a setting for displaying more words per line (without decreasing the font size), perhaps you should try that? The text seems to use the default type face, the condensed would also be better (in my eyes).

2. You are using German text on a Kindle only sold in the USA, are you surprised at the lack of hyphenation? I honestly can't remember if the Kindle does hyphenation in English or not. OK, my bad, it does not (I just checked). I use a smaller font size, so that is less of an issue.

3. Either you don't have paragraphs on that page or the book/text displayed is poorly tagged (is the 'Als Gregor Samsa' a paragraph?). I just checked 3 different books I have and they all have proper paragraph justification.

> Looking beyond ePub, conversion to Kindle format (which unlike ePub is closed).

Once you have HTML, or EPUB (which is s subset of HTML inside a ZIP file) converting to MOBI (which is what the Kindle uses) is trivial.

Trust me. Been there, done that.

The DRM in the Kindle is closed, just like all the (different) DRMs used with ePubs.

I never noticed any problem with reflow or line breaking in my Kindles. The kindle handles text novels just fine. Books with an occasional picture are not more or less of a problem than with LaTeX.

TFA seems to be about children books. In this case, picture placement is much more important. And perhaps as sentences may be shorter, strict line breaking becomes necessary, but not 'harder' (unless you reduce the number of words per line accordingly).

Man, I read the whole 3 books and the only that I would save from them is Tom Bombadil.

The story is vast as an ocean, and deep as a plate.

Isn't it the case that tablets carry smaller batteries so as to reduce weight? Besides battery life is not everything. People have the choice between dump phones that last a month, and smart phones that last 2 days. Most pick the smart phone.

Amazon was the one setting their own price to the books. The publishers (supported by Apple) demanded (at the time that the iPad came to the game) Amazon to only sell their books at a fixed retail price.

I couldn't agree more.

I use Linux almost everywhere including in my last 2 phones (Androids). Like everyone that uses a platform for a while I grew fond of some goodness present in it, which make me reluctant about migrating (say, to iphone/IOS). However, one mighty selling point of the IOS platform is the continuous stream of software updates.

Google still has this completely messed up. There is no Android phone I can buy which I know I'll have future software support for it. All the Nexus phones are normally only available in the USA and England. They reach the rest of the planet much later, and often NOT as "Google experience" devices. Meaning: "NO continuous stream of software updates". For instance, the XOOM was a Google experience device IN THE US, not in Europe (at least not in most of Europe, perhaps it was in England).

Another PITA of Android are the manufacturers additions to it. I would have already bought a Samsung Galaxy S2 if it wasn't for the fact that I simply don't trust Samsung to re-write Android's user interface.

I think that the "know nothing, aggressive abrasive kids" shouting 'XYZ is cool... ABC sux... i'm elite' is a consequence of the popularity of the platform. Its is a bit like saying that the LaTeX dev groups is one of the most civil that there is (from what I heard, no direct experience). I tend to think that _part_ of the reason for it, is that LaTeX development is not the most exciting piece of software tech around.

The distros brought fragmentation to some extent, but it was mostly because of the problems (packaging) that they were tackling to solve. At the same time the BSD family had fragmentation at the kernel level, which Linux doesn't actually have.

AFAIK Java wasn't meant to be faster than or as fast as C/C++, it was meant to be 'fast enough' (for a number of scenarios), maintanable and SAFE.

Call "eclipse -initialize" once. It will improve your start-up time (a little).

Plus paper books take space, have fixed-size small fonts, accumulate dust, won't give me an immediate dictionary look-up, and are a royal-pain-in-the-back when you carry box loads of them when moving to a new house. Oh, 10 paper books also take too much space in my luggage when I take them during my vacations.

[...]

While one's mileage may vary, I haven't yet met a single person that reads a lot that didn't marvel at the possibilities that the e-readers offer.

For the kind of tech and convenience you get, I'd say it is dirty cheap. FWIW by convenience, I mean:
- the price of bookshelves, and the house space that is not occupied by bookshelves,
- I read a lot and my eyes are not 'eagle sharp'. Having adjustable fonts in something which is not a bright monitor is positively awesome and (for me) worth paying a lot more than $100.
- carrying loads of books while on vacation without the weight...
- etc
  Perhaps the $100 is still a lot compared to that for some, but for many I can assure you it is peanuts.

Actually, yes, I am serious. But then you should not take me too literally. I meant to say, I have no basement or a big flat with spare rooms. Flat area is relatively small.

The point is that I don't want to have more "stuff" in the flat. I don't want to have boxes full books that don't fit the shelves, nor stacks of DVDs, or stacks of paper. I live here ;-) I'd rather have an emptier home (*looks around*: boxes of all sorts of stuff, books piled on top of the IKEA shelve, cables running around the table). (I work remotely so I get to look around the house during working hours ;-)). Of course I could stuff it somewhere but then it would be even more "stuff" stuffed at places, and I want to avoid that as much as possible. Don't tell me to buy more storage and rip it, I already own a NAS, and I want to get rid of the last computer with a DVD drive in the house.

I donated all old books that I thought I wasn't going to read again. Unless its work related, I only buy digital books (love the Kindle). I actually donated an old printer primarily because it was not wireless and there was no good place to run the USB cable to the router or desktop (which I will hopefully get rid of).

The local video/media library has titles but not that many. We (me+wife) buy DVDs when we really want to see something. My whole point is that the media industry puts so much money and effort to get these laws passed, but they don't really work to take the money from people like me who can afford it but really needs/wants it with 'digital convenience'.