I still have my EEE Pc 701 from 2007. Still works well with 2GB of RAM, Void Linux+DWM and an extended filesystem in the SD Card. Good for experimenting and for note taking with Emacs+org roam or Zim. Still good for reading wikipedia or stack overflow articles with netsurf or seamonkey(sites with JavaScript). Remember searching open or crackable wifi networks with the little fellow in the palm of my hand. I have another with NetBSD, works well too.
In some ways that era of netbooks felt like the glory days of creative computing devices and OSes. Intel created this really lovely UI on top of Linux called Moblin. My mom ran Jolicloud, which was built around webapps. A bunch of netbooks were coming out with their own Linux flavors to the mass market and webOS was right around the corner.
I'm going to say this with a straight face: if only more people would have had better taste I think we might have inherited a beautiful future of free and open computing.
The Eee PC 701 was cheap and came with Linux OOTB. Now we have to spend thousands of dollars for underpowered garage projects like the MNT Reform or else pay about what we did for the 701 for underpowered laptops that will never get their bugs fixed like the Pinebook.
I think the most accessible small form factor Linux box right now is the Steam Deck. You're paying a bit more for game controller hardware if you just want to use it as a workstation, but it is just Linux under the hood and looks to be a pretty neat cyberdeck-like device.
I recently learned however that the SteamOS desktop is built on a read-only image, with the expectation software will be installed via flatpak.
It is apparently possible to turn the read-only protection off to use pacman or your own thing, but anything you do may be wiped out on the next OS update.
Valve even supplies (sorta buggy) Windows drivers for the Steam Deck: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1675200/view/3131696... - a major selling point of the Deck is that it's just a handheld PC that happens to come pre-installed with a Linux distro designed for handheld PCs. And AFAIK all of its hardware is supported upstream, so other distros should just work by plugging in a flash drive and booting into them.
Other immutable state distros such as Fedora Silverblue and openSUSE MicroOS Desktop offer a “toolbox” environment that runs as a Flatpak with relaxed restrictions for development tasks. Is something like that an option on SteamOS 3?
