The general idea is that the production of the electronics is far more destructive than making an ICE drive system. I am not well read on recent changes, but there was a point where that statement was true, but even then the electronics weren’t worse from greenhouse gas standpoint, just from other toxins.
With all the money they receive from this incredibly intelligent business decision, they are going to stop it from crashing every two seconds… Right?
Have you considered the macbook neo, it’s not a Linux machine, but it is probably the cheapest machine that fits the glorified tablet footprint. I don’t understand the draw to something that basic and lightweight, but if it mattered to me I would probably go with that. Otherwise, as others have pointed out, some flavor of Linux will run on just about anything that isn’t ARM at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if an old netbook would just work for your use case with a lightweight distro.
The systemd thing was just a header, I don’t disagree that it is a step towards age verification, but as far as I am concerned, there is no reason to take drastic measures until that header is actually used in the init system. Your earlier idea of determining the distros position I think will be a better metric as the distro is the more likely entity that will try to implement it.
As an aside, I actually like the systemd header since it will essentially standardize the place for age attestation which assuming your distro doesn’t stop you, you could just pipe some bogus birthday into the field. This is of course assuming the init system doesn’t implement the attestation mechanism.
Unattended remote desktop has been the major sticking point for my switch, I have gotten it to work once I have logged in, but someone needs to log me in after a system reboot. I heard they were working on this with the new login manager, but I haven’t heard anything more about it.