It's a big shame that whenever anything related to Calibre is posted, top comments will often be how arrogant is author is. I used to think the same. But when I read his comments history in GitHub, he doesn't seem a dick to me at all. So I googled his name, and end up in a forum. It completely changed my mind.
Contrary to what people believe, Dovid Goyal is the most friendly programmer to his users. He spent lots of time answering questions in the forum https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166. His answers include where is a menu located, how to convert a book from one format to another, helping the user to debug the exact the problem with Calibre. He has been doing this daily and is very responsive. You can expect an answer to your question in the same day. (The forum used to allow you to read user's comments history anonymously, but now you need a account to do so)
I agree. I am an enthusiastic fan of the Kitty terminal emulator [1], another of his creatures, and I am following its development (though I never managed to contribute with some code). Kovid's answers on the GitHub forum are often short and sound a bit harsh sometimes, yet he's ready to accept others' suggestions and stand corrected when needed.
If only there were more coders like him!
> yet he's ready to accept others' suggestions and stand corrected when needed.
Over the years, the community has volunteered time and time again to develop a new UI for Calibre that would at least bear some resemblance to all the other applications we use on our computer. They would do all the work. His response has always been no.
And there has been his hostility to criticisms of security flaws in his code.
Its an open source project if the so called community actually wanted to do something we already would have different gui port.
It doesn't do all that calibre does obviously but it does most of what I need. It's not per see a fork as it only uses the same database formats and directly call calibre for conversion but it's as close as you get to a "modern" gui on top of calibre.
As usual, the people actually doing the work and the people complaining are strictly different subsets.