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Comment by wronglebowski | Hacker News Reader

The million handhelds running Linux on Aliexpress are incredible if you think about the easy amount of available compute. I just can’t get over the software situation enough to take it seriously. They’re all based on ARM SBCs which have frankly archaic software support. I’m not sure it’ll ever get better, as there seems to be little incentive to get these platforms working on anything like modern Linux.

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The trick is to only buy ones with ROCKNIX support and ignore the rest, no matter how good they sound on paper or how cool the design is. Pretty similar to getting a phone with LineageOS support or router with OpenWrt support, so I managed to get a good one the first time. I have the Anbernic RG353M and would recommend it. The new Retroid Pocket Mini/5 are probably good options as well if you need more power.

https://rocknix.org/ to get started

Are they though? Landfills are full of more powerful and numerous x86 machines, I don’t see anyone bothering to preserve those.

But x86 is usually not handheld, and has a different power efficiency story.

The MiyooCFW project has a full Buildroot-based system with the Linux 5.15.141 kernel running on a number of Miyoo's older F1C100s devices (single-core ARMv5TE, 32MB RAM - from before they were selling anything under their own name): https://github.com/TriForceX/MiyooCFW

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