Post #4093063

So... I have to eat some serious humble pie here: after throwing a huge fit on my timeline and declaring the evolve effectively dead to me, I'm actually keeping it. What turned it around was taking it to Phoenix as my only laptop for a long weekend and realizing that having a full x86 Windows rig with 32 GB of RAM that I can throw over my shoulder, compile paperback natively on, run WSL with, and do real software development on without needing a host PC running at home is just too useful for my workflow to pass up. I still stand by every single critique I made: KeySoft is clunky as hell, the fan/heat is real, and the software layer was undeniably rushed. Plus, The BrailleSense 7 still looks crazy tempting on paper with its fanless ARM build, swappable battery, smaller form factor, swappable keyboards, and instant on for casual couch use, but the dealbreakers on the BS7 are just way too big for me I think: losing physical cursor routing buttons for capacitive double-taps on the display overlay sounds like an absolute nightmare for editing code, I'm willing to wager I could be wrong about this but the BI14 made me hate anything touch capacitive on or near my display. If anyone could get it right it would be HIMS and they tend to have pretty annoying clicky cursor buttons anyway, but I still prefer having them. Also, despite this one not really being their fault I imagine due to trademarks, missing physical thumb keys sucks for a braille-first device, and you're completely locked into HIMS's custom screen reader which doesn't even support custom accessibility actions in third-party Android apps. The Evolve is a weird, warm, imperfect little x86 dev rig, but being able to file actual Liblouis stack traces and bug reports directly to their team means I can actively help fix it, and for what I actually do every day, it turned out to be the right machine.