groche

I'm using a orange pi rv2 and reading the patterson-waterman risc-v book (it's free): http://www.riscvbook.com/

I have other boards less powerful, but the rv2 is more funny and have the vector extension

Gentoo have both sides, the cool community and the suckless community xD You can check it in the telegram groups about gentoo

Or a more old hardware friendly system like netBSD

No. The main diference is that you write a software for Android, it doesn't work in gnu/Linux (without extra layers), but if you write a software for steamOS, literally you are writing a software for gnu/Linux. SteamOS is an arch Linux modified to be immutable with a custom (and free) kernel with extra support that they merge after in mainline, with the steam app oppened by default. SteamOS use all the software stack for gnu Linux. Android develop their own stack and work different.

afro samurai is a masterpiece

But you want to use systemd-boot? Obviously you need to install systems-utils if you want to install systemd-boot, but you can use grub or something else bootloader

You can install gentoo-kernel-bin and everything works fine. About SystemD, you needn't systemd as init, but you need systemd as udev or other things. Only follow the guide with a non-systemd profile

Apparently the dbt for the Ubuntu image confirmed the x1 CPU a clone for the spacemit k1

Nowadays a lot of hardware works very well on Linux, the main approach of this vendors is not the compatibility (has guaranteed but as you say in a thinkpad you have the same compatibility), the approach is about a free software (or mostly free) firmware, and in this case, free and secure implementation for the firmware an all secureboor chain

If snap or flathub repos are in the store, any mainstream application be in. In the other side, if you don't know what are you doing and install random packages, the most probably is that you'll broke your system

The normal people doesn't install software external to the store or configure the system a lot, in IOS you can't do this things and everyone is fine. For share network in gnome you can do it with a button in the WiFi settings

In my firs time with linux I install ubuntu (maybe 12.04, I dont't remember, it was gnome 2) in the only PC in my parents home, I delete windows, and we was using it 2 years without knowing what is a terminal and everything went fine, the problems appeard when I was discover the terminal hahahaha