Had a similar experience with my kobo, but I was able to forward the usb port to a windows 10 virtual machine (using qemu kvm with the help of virt-manager). It

Had a similar experience with my kobo, but I was able to forward the usb port to a windows 10 virtual machine (using qemu kvm with the help of virt-manager). It might work for you too. Added bonus: you could snapshot the vm and always have a working copy around.