I was at one point very interested in the Remarkable. Since then it seems like they've shifted in a much more locked down proprietary direction with their cloud services. My (not thoroughly researched) instinct is that I'm not sure I could just buy the device and use it offline, at least not without serious downgrades to the functionality that I'm not willing to take.
But I haven't looked into it deeply enough to know if that's actually the case or if I just had a knee-jerk reaction to their changes. It's just tricky to add another locked-down device to the ecosystem, despite what people say about circumventing those locks. It makes me nervous that the APIs aren't more supported and that the locks need to be circumvented. It makes me nervous because I've used devices that start getting more and more aggressive about pushing me into a cloud service over time -- and it's usually an unpleasant experience.
I highly agree with the author that "less is more" but I'm finding that I still want radically open ecosystems where I can do a lot. The problem with having a full-featured OS with apps like Android/iOS is that it's annoying and difficult to pair that stuff down to being so basic that the device only does one thing and does it well. I want a device that can do a lot of things that I can then pair down into a device that does one thing well.
I'm lightly following the Librem Note but even though the hardware seems good I'm worried that there's not going to be the same software focus on getting as physically low latency as possible out of the pen? My understanding is that there's a lot of custom logic happening on the Remarkable to make that happen, and I'm worried that the Linux side of things is just going to eventually get drivers pen input and call it a day.
Latency is one of those things where... you can get it to an acceptable level where it feels OK to write on. But even the Remarkable itself is boasting 21 milliseconds of latency and that is noticeable latency -- it's still in the area where I would be tempted to just keep using paper. Especially if you've ever gotten used to writing with a fountain pen or good ink pen where writing just feels good, latency on a screen really, really matters and every millisecond you can shave off is worthwhile.
And I still need to look into the writing feel and what textures they use for the surface. It's really important for a casual notetaking device that it actually feel like I'm writing on paper. But if I could snap my fingers and make software and firmware magically appear out of thin air I'd love a Librem Note with similar latency that had an extremely paired down Linux OS that was less focused on porting Gnome and more focused on being just a notepad/E-reader. It's still just very early days for the device and a lot of its potential seems very theoretical right now.