For the hobbyist, the best part of the modern embedded chips with few MB of RAM (including ESP32) is that they _don't_ run Linux. I maintain a few devices at h

For the hobbyist, the best part of the modern embedded chips with few MB of RAM (including ESP32) is that they _don't_ run Linux. I maintain a few devices at home, both Linux and non-Linux, and the non-Linux are just so much nicer from operation perspective. Everything is described by a few files checked into git, and there is literally no way to sneak any other state in. If the device breaks, or I want another one, or I want to see what changed, it's just a few text files to examine. Compare it with typical Raspberry Pi, which started with huge microsd image, then there were unknown "apt-get install"'s and some system files modified... Unless you are very, very good with documentation, each one is a special snowflake. The best you can do is to run backup script on them, and restore on rebuild, but it's much worse experience than having a single "pio run -t upload" in the git repo. (I know there are ways to create immutable Linux system and push it from main PC, just like with microcontrollers - but this is not very well documented path. And much bigger size of the Linux system makes this impractical for rapid iteration) I think USB device drivers are the _only_ reason to run Linux on the small device. If you don't need those, keep away from Linux. (not that ESP32-P4 would be any good on it - the spec mention "768 KiB SRAM", which is laughably small for Linux. And putting PSRAM on board will make it as expensive as other Linux computers)