[gbba]

It's meant to run GNU Linux instead of Android, so maybe the 4GB RAM might be ok?

Definitely not enough if this was running Android. RAM usage on my Android right now: - 2.1 GB Android OS - 1.0 GB Google - 0.5 GB Android System - 0.5 GB Firefox - 0.4 GB Android System Intelligence - 0.4 GB System UI - 0.4 GB Google Play services ... and a bunch more < 0.1 GB services that seem necessary

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Android really shat on, set fire to and salted one of my favourite things about Linux in this regard. I.e, how few resources I can give it and still be productive. Hell, I'm gonna assert right now that if Android didn't waste such gobs of memory, I could still be doing the... oh, about 4 or 5 things a phone is actually useful for, on hardware equivalent to the SGS1.

I know, because I did all those things on the SGS1 and it worked fine.

Seriously, what the fuck happened?

[supertrope]

That's the difference between GNU/Linux and Android.

Android uses Java because there's an existing market of Java developers. Java does not have much inherent overhead but like any tool with a lower barrier to entry a lot of lower quality software hits the market. Optimizing for time to market by each company's app team is where the wheels come off the bus. People expect software to be free or $0.99. Companies are pushing the technical limits on how much data can be mined bloating their apps. Android is fragmented across diverse hardware, operating system versions, and cellular carrier permutations making testing and QA a much harder problem.