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dagi3d

What are they using instead?

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Linux with compositors (sometimes custom ones) for graphical applications. Weston is fairly popular, for example.

Or even nothing at all, you can run Qt6 standalone and have a very nice touch interface.

Raspberry Pi using Chromium in kiosk mode and a small touchscreen is my go-to for stuff like this.

Out of curiosity, how performant is Chromium on rPI in your experience?

I tried a pi3b for stuff like this and it is fine on 720p if you don't need many/complex animations. Fine, but not good.

Some years ago I worked on software for the Google Home Hub (v1), which according to this teardown¹ has a quad Cortex-A53, same as a Raspberry Pi 3. Before Flutter and Fuchsia, they ran Chromium² on Linux, and they were fine. There was some tuning, but Chrome's performance tools³ are not bad and work decently on remote targets.

¹ https://www.edn.com/teardown-google-home-hub-smart-speaker-a...

² Chromecast builds, which are slightly less than full Chrome: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...

³ https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/trace-event-prof...

~~Moblin~~ ~~Maemo~~ ~~MeeGo~~ Tizen and other Linux+compositor OS, with custom app stacks

All of them are discontinued. PostmarketOS seems to be the only well maintained mobile Linux distro

Tizen is still in development, a new version was released just yesterday[0]. Samsung still uses it in their smart TVs and smart fridges.

[0] https://docs.tizen.org/platform/release-notes/tizen-8-0-m2/

At my company we develop SDK based on a JVM for small devices (https://developer.microej.com/supported-hardware/). We also have a compatibility layer with Android applications.

Android requires really large memory and storage, I can hardly believe it can run on lightweight CPU systems, unless it's running elsewhere and just talk to this MCU via some layer or API.

Yes that's how some of our customers use it: have the heavy computation done on one CPU and use another light MCU when possible to save battery (for example for smartwatches).

We have our own JVM tailored for MCU.

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