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You are right to start with low-end devices:

Get it running brilliantly on cheap hardware. Don't waste anything. Make the OS efficient. Do things in the most direct way possible with a minimum of red tape. Expose the bare metal to Javascript. Put the bare minimum features in the OS and let open source grow around that.

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I think out of everyone you've really hit the nail here. It's about starting a movement, and taking the platform in a direction it's been needing to go to for a long time. The collaborative nature of open source should grow around this project as soon as the product arrives, and I really hope it does.

Addendum: Don't fall into the Linux trap. Don't start off being "great on old hardware!" but eventually grow so huge as to need the same specs as modern Windows (my i7 laptop with 4 GB of RAM runs like crap, thanks Debian). Do things in a straightforward way, but in such a way that you can expand without tacking on loads of extra code.

Is Debian your problem, or GNOME?

My phone runs Linux, and it has 512MB RAM and a 1GHz ARM processor.

It's not GNOME, I haven't run GNOME on a day-to-day basis in over 7 years. Actually, I think it's probably Firefox that screws me as much as anything else.

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