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KOReader

Seeing moddedBear talking about using the pre-installed proprietary reader software on a Kobo made me want to recount my experiences with KOReader.

moddedBear's Kobo Clara BW Review

KOReader

KOReader is a free software document viewer optimised for use on e-ink devices. It's straightforward to install on a Kobo device.

The features I find most useful

Good support for epub, pdf, djvu, plaintext, html, among various other formats.
Support for highlighting and adding notes to text.
SSH server, so you can easily scp files to the device on a wireless network.
Terminal emulator, useful for scping files from remote machines, sshing to remote machines for various purposes, text editing, and for using all your favourite command-line software (if you manage to cross-compile it to arm). Actually the terminal emulator integrated into KOReader isn't so great, I use a custom fbpad-based one instead.
Easy offline dictionary lookup with associated spaced-repetition "vocab builder" -- particularly useful when reading books in a language you're still learning.
Wikipedia search (online only).
Customisable UI -- everything can be done from menus, but you can also associate most actions to gestures, making for a highly efficient UI after a bit of learning.

The frontend is written in Lua, and it's pretty easy to hack on. As well as switching out the terminal emulator, I've hacked on it to customise the keyboard to dvorak with easy access to control chars etc, made some actions gesturable, and made various other little customisations. That was all before I actually learned lua. I also have a work-in-progress gemini browser plugin -- I'm not really ready to talk about that, but let me know if it could be of interest to you, I'm more likely to work on it if I think there could be a second user.

I haven't really played much with the default Kobo software, so I can't really compare, but it looked much more limited and annoying (trying to push some "store" at you, in particular).

Imperfections

The wireless network UI is pretty basic, handling only password-based authentication. Eduroam in particular doesn't work that way (but it is possible to connect with the right wpa_supplicant config). Evil public wifi networks which require visiting some web page to accept T&Cs are at best very annoying to use, since there's no web browser beyond wget.
The default terminal emulator isn't good for serious use, with a too-large font and lots of wasted space, and iirc lacking in ANSI support.
No gemini support yet, neither for gemtext nor for the protocol, even though this seems a rather natural fit.
The stability isn't perfect in my experience, though that may well be due to my hacks... occasionally I make it crash, and sometimes the UI ignores input after waking from sleep until I cycle it again.

Summary

KOReader is pretty great!