Amazing software, with an interesting collection of oddities.

Definitely *the* go-to software for managing an e-book library, as far as I can tell - it's one of the few things I don't hesitate to recommend to anyone who asks, regardless of the type of user or the platform they're using.

That said, the reason it's the default recommendation isn't that it's beautiful, user-friendly, intuitive or even necessarily entirely coherent - it's the default recommendation because *nothing* comes close to it for functionality and support. Outside the server space it's hard to think of any other piece of Free Software that's so dominant in its niche.

There a definitely a lot of oddities about the way it works - the article discussed many. The one that bit me for ages was the behaviour of the downloadable installation script: it wanted to install to system locations, and didn't provide any way to configure this - in particular, attempting to install as a regular user into ~/.local resulted in either a partially broken (but still usable) installation, or needed to be run as root so that it could install some desktop customisation files into locations under /usr. After a bunch of digging into the script I figured out a way to resolve the issues and get it all installed happily under ~/.local - mostly a matter of doing an "isolated" install into ~/.local/libexec and then running the calibre_postinstall script separately. I did make an effort to implement some changes to the way the installation script is generated to improve things, but Life(tm) got in the way . . .

The statistics collection is something I'd never heard of, and definitely counts as another oddity - it's hard to care too much about *this* particular minor privacy breach (from a personal perspective) in this day and age, but such things should certainly be made more visible.

And Kovid Goyal definitely deserves much respect for his work - calibre is an amazing piece of software and an extraordinarily successful project, and kitty is an excellent terminal, and as a project has been very influential in helping modernise terminal emulators in general.