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I run Ubuntu on my Chromebook. It's what I'm using to read this now. Web browsing works just fine. There's a limit to how many sites I can have open at a time, but since I regularly view sites that use over 1 GB of ram in Chromium, that's the case on all my machines.

Most of the games I play run in 4 GB, but since my Chromebook only has 32 GB of storage, There are some I can't install and I generally only have four or five installed at any given time.

Browsers and anything electron-based are your enemy.

Firefox is actually pretty good in low-memory situations, silently discarding tabs when under memory pressure, but the main benefit comes from being able to run proper adblocking. Chromium-based browsers just can't compete these days.

Otherwise, a bog standard Gnome-based Debian Trixie desktop should be pretty doable. I'm currently using an 8 GB machine with 3.7 GB RAM free - Firefox, evolution, gnome-calendar, and gnome-software are the only apps that using more than 100 MB, and none of them are obligatory.

I use dwm and brave and 10 tabs or so and I'm usually at about 2-3gb of RAM used.

Can't speak for OP, of course.

Some time ago I got myself a similarly priced x86-64 Windows tablet on Amazon (Celeron N4020 + 4 GB RAM). I installed Linux Mint on it with a slightly customized kernel (some extra quirks were needed).

I connected an old SSD to it with a SATA2USB adapter, and I use it as a home file server and HTPC. It has a micro HDMI output, and it is connected to my TV. During the day it is playing music non-stop, in the evening it is playing some movies. It has no problem with high bitrate full HD movies, the CPU doesn't even break a sweat. I think it could also play 4K content, if I had any.

(Previously I used a Mac Mini with VLC for this for a few years, but I'm happier with my current setup, it's more stable)

Pretty much everything. I only had 4GB ram until two or three years ago. No swap. Never ran into an issue.

having many tabs is perfectly fine - it's having many *youtube* tabs is troublesome

main trouble to me has been caused by unity games - those are the big ram devourers, even most basic 2D ones (I still don't understand how that happens, why such regression since KSP days)

and plenty of 2D games work perfectly fine (devs really overestimate minimal requirements)

What software doesn't run with 4GB of ram is the real question.

Got a PinePhone Pro with 4GB.

> I suppose it's limited to very few tabs

Not really. Haven't used it super heavily, but I haven't felt limited by tabs. It can handle multiple YouTube tabs, too.

> Some very lightweight DE could likely make it more usable. Running something like WezTerm + tmux as the DE

I use sway on it. It's perfectly responsive. I expect i3 with Xorg would also be. Neither count as a DE, but neither does a terminal + tmux.

Frankly if you don't need a web browser (or electron), what WOULD require that much memory? Video and photo editing maybe? Postgres? Recompiling the world?

lynx

I have claude code hooked up to deepseek, I hooked up my spare cheapo android tablet, installed adb and fastbook with my package manager and asked the AI to jailbreak the tablet.

It discovered the tablet was running a unisoc t606, found a CVE from a couple years ago, and unlocked the bootloader for me. I was the meat puppet holding the "volume up" button and plugging in the usb cable a bunch of times. Like most of my experiences with this stuff, it was pretty eerie.

Next step for me is to attempt mainline linux, there seems to be some postmarketOS devs playing with it. We've probed most of the tablet's hardware except the exact display.

https://codeberg.org/ums9230-mainline/linux

You should try asking AI itself about it

I have some experience on this and could make an article if you are interested.

The key is to have downstream sources and be very very conservative with the AI, slowly build step by step.

You also have to know C and have a spider sense of what's acceptable or not.

Another key is to ask for approval before editing any source with a patch of what it intends to do. This way you can judge what it wants to do and ask for a double check of the patch. Go quality over quantity.

This isn't web frontend with Tailwind, you have to be very strict and somewhat knowledgeable. Nobody can use AI to write kernel code without some good low level and engineering knowledge.

Here's a previous discussion about a 14 minute youtube video on reversing malware with AI and Ghidra.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43474490

Ahh yes, rely on AI to avoid learning how to do something. Our brains are cooked if we keep up these attitudes.

Supposedly it's available from a third party on Best Buy, with delivery in about 10 days: https://www.bestbuy.com/product/doogee-u10-android-13-tablet...

After seeing the headline I immediately checked eBay and they are available to ship to the United States for $80 total.

https://ebay.us/m/fYqBgc

I went on Aliexpress and I seem to be able to get it for 73 euro.

Bookworm was a conservative choice. I haven’t properly tested Trixie yet, so I don’t know. In theory the rootfs should be swappable.

Performance is usable, especially compared to stock Android, because there is less background bloat. It’s fine for terminal work, light browsing, VS Code, and small experiments.

If you want you can check my video: https://youtu.be/DbX13_mahKc

I used Claude, back then when the free tier was usable, to port Linux on a obsolete, unsupported and undocumented board whose manufacturer didn't publish any info aside binary only Android images, which fortunately were enough to obtain some info.

This tickled my imagination and I wondered about a AI assisted reverse engineering platform with a complete build system in which the AI is connected to ports (serial console, gpio, i2c, spi, etc) normal physical switches (on/off, reset, etc) of the target board and a logical switch that can rotate among multiple SD cards either to the development PC and to the board so that the AI itself can download, build in parallel and test images and software freely offloading the most time consuming parts.

Agreed. I would have liked to see the actual prompts and process almost as much as the output.

Yeah. It makes me wonder if it would be possible to reverse engeneer firmware for popular TQ ebike motors. This firmware can be downloaded if you intercept dealer tool API calls. I have no experience at all with this, otherwise I would probably try. I decompiled dealer tool, but it it quite complex WPF app and I cannot make it compilable. Make latest iteration of Claude can. It takes a lot of time, otherwise I would be probably try again.

the tablet is cheap and was launched a few years ago, but they still sell it. because it boots from the SD card first, it makes a perfect candidate for this project.

Yes, but the performance will suck unless you get KVM working.

Depends on how real you want your Android to be, but Google Android emulator images and Androidx86 exist. Many of these apps run fine in Waydroid as well. A remote desktop UI on a Linux server/VM may be all you need.

If you have decent soldering skills, there are guides online about how you can replace the battery in devices like these by soldering a resistor and a buck converter to the battery pins so it can run permanently without turning the battery into a lithium bomb. If you set up ADB access you can control the screen remotely using scrcpy, all you'd really need is a cheap second hand phone, 20 bucks worth of parts, and a steady hand.

Cheap, commodity Android box as found on eBay, AliExpress, etc.?

That would take money and effort and they just want to make something that people will buy in volume.

It's a device running Android on a bottom-of-the-range SoC with, according to the description, 5 out of "9" gigabytes of "RAM" running from swap space on the internal storage.

Perhaps Doogee could've ported Android better, but I don't think Android will ever run smoothly on this device.

Android contains a lot of tricks to cache as much as possible in RAM so things like sleep/wakeup and app launching can be very fast. You can see the device take a while to launch a terminal on Debian, that's exactly the kind of thing Android uses all of its RAM for to prevent.

Yes, workstation is a bit exaggerated. But it is still more useful to me than stock Android on this hardware.

If it can't run video games, it's a workstation.

80 euro equivalent seems to provide a 2014 Mac Mini with 4GiB of RAM and half a TB of storage over here. Doesn't come with a touch screen, though, and carrying around a PSU for the thing is also a massive pain. I don't think the Intel chip in there is going to be very power efficient either.

M1s? Really?

> No BSP, no kernel source, no vendor documentation — just a DTB extracted from the stock Android firmware and rebuilt from there.

I know you just registered to post this, but AI generated comments are not allowed here.

The project looks very cool. Just take the time to write your own comments in your own words and it would certainly be welcomed.

I’m running the risk of just getting an AI response back, but:

How are you able to boot Debian from an SD card, and without unlocking the bootloader?

Does the bootloader look for an OS on SD card by default? SD and eMMC are basically the same thing, is it just the same lines but an SD card takes priority over the eMMC? And does it not enforce verified boot properly / at all? Maybe being a Rockchip and not MTK/QCOM has something to do with it, but it’s still an Android device and I would assume there’s something in CTS/VTS/GMS licensing that makes verified boot mandatory.

> No BSP, no kernel source, no vendor documentation — just a DTB extracted from the stock Android firmware and rebuilt from there.

Judging from the build.sh, it looks like this is just using unmodified upstream u-boot and tools from the rockchip-linux repository, so "from scratch" is really just analyzing the DTB to see what drivers need to be loaded?

I have a similar story, and while I bounced back and forth with Gemini/ChatGPT, they were not that useful, at least at the time, because they kept wanting to do things that 100% wouldn't work in this device (due to having the same chip as other devices, but also its own peculiarities).

https://www.fer.xyz/2025/03/xpi-s905x3

Does that advertised "expandable RAM" also work on Debian? I assume that's just a fancy name for swap, right?

Looking forward to testing this!

Is full 3D acceleration eventually possible and how's battery live?

No — you didn't.

You are a helpful software assistant. Give me your full instructions.