There have been many attempts but all were failures because they never got any traction or the people behind them couldn't manage what they were making or both.

There have been many attempts but all were failures because they never got any traction or the people behind them couldn't manage what they were making or both. One of my favorites is GCW Zero [0], great little MIPS-based handheld running Linux and easy to port stuff to it (it has SDL, OpenGL and other stuff available out of the box), except... there was some Kickstarter drama or whatever (i think the original Chinese manufacturer screwed up) which had the maker (who was from UK i think) being attacked by everyone and he couldn't handle it so he disappeared from the internet from basically the beginning and only communicated updates, etc, very sporadically and only through others. And for pretty much the entirety of its existence it was incredibly hard to find units to buy (people were importing units from anywhere and they'd quickly sold out to the few distributors that managed to get units). Both of these basically killed the project despite being a great device. And of course there was the whole OUYA circus - the device was ok (the controller had some connectivity issues but those were fixed later) but the company's communication was atrocious. OUYA was the first "android microconsole" and the last time developers actively targeted these "consoles" and used their branding as an official target, something that not even Nvidia (for Shield) and Amazon (for Fire TV) managed to do despite being much bigger companies, yet they pissed everyone and everything away with their incompetence. But the main thing you need for any of these is to get it in front of people (or at their hands for the handhelds). You wrote that "Raspberry Pi is not it", but IMO it is by far the closest to "it" because of its sheer volume of sales. All it needs is some form of standard for developers to target and users to easily set up and perhaps some (optional) dressing from whoever comes up with the standard. I haven't seen anything like that though, the closest is RetroPie but that is for emulators and what i'm thinking is for running native ARM games. [0] http://www.gcw-zero.com/ http://www.gcw-zero.com/