I’ve run into exactly the same issue with my large ttrpg ebook/pdf collection (+100k file data hoarding… it’s not a problem, I swear) and I’ve not really found a good option I’m entirely happy with. Calibre duplicates everything and I don’t like the thought of having my collection’s organization tied to a specific piece of software if I just delete my duplicates. Plus I’m elitist and think the UI/logo are gross to look at.

Zotero is the least worst option I’ve found, but it’s geared towards scholarly journals and such, so not great, but serviceable. Not sure if it’s on linux though.

Jellyfin is apparently able to handle ebooks with a plugin, though I didn’t particularly care for it when I tried it months ago.

There’s a handful of other ebook software out there, mostly geared towards comics/manga, so depending on what you have those might be worth looking for.

I’d like to use Obsidian for it and just turn the directory into a vault and let it automatically scan the folders for files, but that doesn’t work great either.

The best piece of software I’ve seen that could potentially handle it is an app called Stashapp… which is unfortunately geared towards adult film. But it’s feature-set if it could be applied to PDFs seems like it would be ideal.

I have encountered this issue before when I tried using Obsidian my RPG pdf collection (10,000s of files), would not recommend. I do still like Obsidian and will keep using it, but would something like Trillium work as a sort of PDF library software for a massive amount of files like that? The main need is to be able sort/categorize game systems using tags, link to pdfs, and maybe have some sort of Dataview-esque query capabilities. Zotero is the least worst option, but it still has some annoyances for me and I’ve still been looking for something that could help me organize better. I know this is billed as a note-taking app, so it’s a weird use-case, but Obsidian was pretty close to being a decent solution, if not for the slow speed issues.

That’s alot of… homework files.

It’s for organizing… homework.

Yeah, I’ve been messing around with LM Studio for a few weeks/months now and compared to the alternatives, that’s about the easiest thing out there. Setup through Command Line seems to be the norm outside of that. I was just messing around with trying to install the ChromaDB plugin for LM Studio and ran into that issue of the command line again. Like I don’t know if they’re talking about just the generic Windows Command Line program, if Git needs to be installed, is it in a python environment or does python need installed, and the guides I’ve tried going through seem to just skip over these basic steps and just assume you already know exactly what they’re talking about, that seems like a regular thing, just not enough preliminary explanation.

Like, I’ve had some experience with coding over the years in various languages, but I’m used to a certain amount of hand-holding for basic guides, something like, “You’ll need this installed from here, go ahead and load up this thing, blah blah blah.” In most of the tutorials I’ve been seeing for anything related to LLMs or AI image generators or whatever, there’s just rarely any acknowledgement of complete newbies to the process, it’s just assumed you know everything they’re talking about already. I realize it’s alot of copy/pasting and it’s pretty straight-forward, but it feels like many guides are just glossing over really basic need-to-know info.

That’s how it feels with alot of self-hosted AI stuff now. Even the youtube videos out there that start off with, “Hey guys, I’m gonna show you this super simple, easy way you can run your own self-hosted LLM. First pull up terminal…” and proceeds to spend a half-hour going over some kind of basic coding and cloning repos that’s still way above my head. Is it Git? Is it python? Is it both, what the fuck is going on? I just wanted an uncensored AI model that will generate My Little Pony furry porn, not a master-class in writing a bunch of seemingly random nonsensical commands.

I use Discord with friends for a weekly online D&D game in what’s basically a glorified conference calls. It’s fine for that use-case, but it fucking sucks for trying to do anything organized or having on-topic conversations or looking up any sort of stored information. I kind of hate it when game companies have shit on there and you have to search/sort through hundreds of unconnected chat snippets to find answers to questions.

I’ve been looking for something for my RPG pdf collection and haven’t really found anything that scratches every need I have for it yet. I’ve gone through most of what’s out there and didn’t really see many great options. I mostly want to organize/categorize my collection of ttrpg e-books (reading I can do through dropbox as I don’t really jump from one item to another often enough to justify syncing my entire 100k+ collection), so I just settled on Zotero. It’s mainly meant for journals and scholarly works, but it seems like it fits part of my use-case and it’s tagging features are decent enough. Syncing PDFs is an option, but I’d have to get into the paid tier to have my whole collection accounted for.

Jellyfin I guess does have support for ebooks through a plug-in, but it isn’t terribly great IMO and you’ll still need something else like Tailscale I believe to actually be able to view stuff outside of your home wifi network. There’s some other options out there I believe, though they all seemed to be geared towards Manga collections, so if you’re looking to organize through this system, those may not work as well either (and you still may need Tailscale regardless).

Years ago I was dual-booting with Ubuntu just to try out whatever this Linux thing was that all the nerds were talking about. Liked it and played around with it, but for whatever reason I wanted to go back to just Windows, I needed the space I had partitioned off or something, can’t remember why. So I just uninstalled or deleted the bootloader somehow (maybe I just deleted the Linux partition and expected the space to clear up like normal).

Go to restart the computer… oh shit. Ohshotohshitohshitohshit.

I’m probably the biggest simpleton in this thread, but I was just looking at this earlier and TiddlyWiki still seems like the easiest of the easiest. It’s literally just an html file that requires pretty minimal setup to get going. Nothing else seems to even come close. I’ve been using it for a couple of years as a sort of internal departmental job aid, just basic information for our group and it’s pretty straight-forward.

Jesus fuck. I have been looking for something like Kavita for so long now, specifically because of the issues you outlined with Calibre wanting to duplicate my library. I have thousands to tens of thousands of PDFs I’ve needed to get organized for so long and duplicating it all is not feasible (plus Calibre’s interface just looks 20 years out of date). I just got Kavita loaded and scanning my library and my initial impression is that this will do everything I’ve been wanting for so long. Thanks for the tip!

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I’ve gone back after I’ve already pirated something and bought a legal copy if I thought it was worth it or if it’s in some sort of Humble Bundle deal that benefits charity and gets me a legal copy at the same time. Sometimes I’ll even pirate things I already bought & paid for because I want a backup copy (in the case of books or tabletop games).

Incredibly exclusive userbase, less than 100 users ever at any one time.

I’ve got a sideways monitor, a rightway monitor and a laptop all scrunched together, what does that make me?

I keep looking for a document manager for my PDF RPG collection, but haven’t found anything yet that really checks all the boxes. Calibre is the big one that always gets mentioned, but I’ve got something around +10k files and don’t want it absorbing shit into its own filing system, plus its UI was ugly the last time I looked.

“You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

Try to seed as much as I can, usually around 2:1, though my ratio is only 1.57 on one of the sites I frequent, so I’m apparently just a leech.

Try to seed as much as I can, usually around 2:1, though my ratio is only 1.57 on one of the sites I frequent, so I’m apparently just a leech.

I get so irrationally mad about passwords now, and then it’s like every 3 months, no matter what password phrase I come up with, with whatever non-sensual special characters and spaces added in, it’s compromised in some hack, so no matter how good your password is, they’ll just get it from the source anyways.