I literally ran a Linux VPS for years on 256MB of RAM. 128MB is plenty. Throw down Busybox and cut some corners, run uClib rather than glibc, etc. etc. You'll

I literally ran a Linux VPS for years on 256MB of RAM. 128MB is plenty. Throw down Busybox and cut some corners, run uClib rather than glibc, etc. etc. You'll be surprised what fits in there. My 256MB Linux VPS was Apache + Bash, full scale Linux. There's plenty of room there. 128MB is small for a "mainstream" Linux / Ubuntu install, but 128MB isn't even "Linux from Scratch" levels of size. Linux from Scratch is probably like 32MB or so RAM needed. And that's still "kit" Linux (IE: a prebaked "kit" where the OSS community already made a bunch of optimizations for you, but no application-specific optimization decisions yet), not even going into difficult levels of optimization yet. > The hardware could be the best in the world - but this poor ecosystem support is the bane of most Chinese SBC and the reason why almost everyone uses Raspberry Pi, despite it certainly not being neither the cheapest, most powerful or having lowest power consumption. EDIT: I think you have a fine point on this front. I know that MIPS chips are still available from some manufacturers (like Microchip's PIC-line), and I think they're Linux compatible. That might be a better way to go. But this ~128MB "sized" Linux instance seems perfectly usable to me. Good softare/Linux support would be preferred of course.