Repairable FOSS E-Ink tablet? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world to c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk

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I'm in the market for a repairable FOSS e-ink tablet, as my pocketbook's touchscreen has died, and it's a glued together piece of trash. The manufacturer charges 2/3 of the price of a new one for the repair.

Got products or manufacturers?

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[-] ozymandias@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

remarkable is built on linux and lets you ssh into it and do shit… and there’s some open source alternative gui stuff, but it’s not completely foss as far as i know… and mine stopped working with the pen and there’s no way to really repair it… but it’s something.
also when the pen does work, it works really nice.
….
oh, also they’re norwegian

[-] cabbage@piefed.social 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, the only truly open source option out there is the PineNote, which is very much non-European. In terms of repairability I expect it would score (relatively) highly though, being designed to be tinkerer-friendly.

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago

OLPC (one-laptop-per-child) is a FOSS e-ink laptop (but small enough to function as an e-reader). Though I think they are no longer made and they were always hard to get.

[-] cabbage@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

Do you have a source? According to Wikipedia OLPC shut down in 2014. I found some old reporting about a spin-off, but couldn't make sense of it.

[-] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago

I’m not sure what you want a source for. You mean a vendor who will sell one? XO-4 Touch was apparently the last model. I just had a look at laptop.org and the site looks useless now. It used to be full of wikis with copious details about the hardware and software of the OLPC.

There are (or were) a variety of NGOs who worked on getting OLPCs into impoverished schools. One of them was https://unleashkids.org/. They are not in the business of selling them but ~15 yrs ago they were kind enough to sell some. The idea was that teachers and developers would need them to help support the OLPC project. I suggest touching base with them and see what they say, since they seem to still be around.

The XO-4 Touch came with “Sugar”, a foss OS just for kids. It was easy to make it boot into Gnome instead (underpinned by RedHat). And someone made an Android OS that could be flashed onto an SD card and booted in the OLPC. I should mention that the OLPC was never 100% FOSS. The usual shit-show of blobs for some of the hardware drivers. I mainly just used it as an e-reader on Gnome.

I’ve always been baffled that these FOSS e-ink laptops did not make it onto the general marketplace, while at the same time there were no commercial makers of anything like it. There was a “Pixel QI” dual-mode screen that could be bought bare and installed in Thinkpads and other machines, but for some reason that never took off either.

[-] cabbage@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

I misunderstood and thought you talked about a newer product than the original OLPC, which I was unaware had a transflective display. That's cool, I'd love to see it in practice. The device is pretty ancient by now though, and as you said hard to come by.

E-ink generally refers to electronic paper displays, which is different from (and much more expensive than) transflective LCDs. So I was confused by the prospect of OLPC having it, especially as the technology barely existed for consumer hardware back when these laptops were made.

My favourite anecdote about the OLPC was how the antennas enabled farmers to communicate locally, and basically unionizing against exploitative practices by the assholes who were buying their crops. It was a really cool project.

this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026

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