I think devices like the Framework 12 continue to be available but RAM and SSD costs won’t necessarily mean that lower end performance will not necessarily mean afforable, at least all the way through 2026.

pmOS / Alpine Linux is definitively a bit outside my comfort zone. The apk package manager is so weird with its add and del commands instead of install and remove everyone else uses.

It came with a factory reset version of Win10 but that ran so insanely bad, it kept crashing which to this degree isn’t normal even for Windows which is why I suspect faulty hardware.

The graphical installer is a it bare bones but easy to use. Setup is slow because in the background it generates a disk image of packages that are being downloaded and the write speed of my USB drive was a big bottle neck. Selection of native packages isn’t the greatest but pmOS comes with Flathub configured out of the box. (I’m usually a proponent of Flatpak but being so memory constrained, I refrain from the overhad of loading Flatpak runtimes into memory.