AIUI the RM2 still only has the official OS, which has no promises not to break APIs. There's Parabola-RM (ported by Davis R, see www.davisr.me) which gets you e.g. Xfce, but I don't know how well it works with the hardware (e.g. battery life, proper use of the RM screen's partial refresh) or unofficial RM apps (rmkit.dev and libremarkable-baswd apps right now AIUI).
If you're looking for non-RM alternatives, I'd start by evaluating (I haven't) the Quirklogic Papyr.
Personally, I don't think the RM is a good long-term partner for the Free Software community - half the reason the modding community exists is because the RM team refuses to provide some basic features in the name of "simplicity". They'll never want to support a wide variety of use-cases, they want to be like Apple. I imagine the solution here is making an RM-specific distro (and community explicitly segmented from the "RM OS with mods" community), adding support for other ewriters, then deemphasizing the RM.
Every so often I have an itch to find a good eInk tablet, and each time I come away disappointed.
Outside the remarkable and a few locked in reader only tablets, the market gets really sketchy (no pun intended) real fast. Lots of questionable companies and brands like Boox, which is disappointing as feature wise the Boox hardware seems more ideal and hackable than the comparatively (and intentionally!) primitive/restricted remarkable kit.
There are a few sort of decent companies with okay products, some even publish their modded kernel sources, but in the end I've never been able to pull the trigger on these $300+ devices that often have both severe hardware and software limitations.
eInk is cool, but it's hard to toss that kind of cash around with so many strings attached...
Koreader is said to run on the rm2. The ddvk hacks are pretty good either. I don't know about the state of alternative launchers though.
The onyx boox have bluetooth and you can connect as keyboard to it and since they have access to the play store you could probably also run vim on it. This is something I miss on the rm2.
Avoid Onyx Boox, they explicitly refused to honor the GPL. https://old.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/hsn7kx/onyx_usin...
If you're looking for non-RM alternatives, I'd start by evaluating (I haven't) the Quirklogic Papyr.
Personally, I don't think the RM is a good long-term partner for the Free Software community - half the reason the modding community exists is because the RM team refuses to provide some basic features in the name of "simplicity". They'll never want to support a wide variety of use-cases, they want to be like Apple. I imagine the solution here is making an RM-specific distro (and community explicitly segmented from the "RM OS with mods" community), adding support for other ewriters, then deemphasizing the RM.