As computing power becomes cheaper and microprocessors become more capable, a steady trend in recent decades is to see more everyday devices hiding Linux under the hood somewhere. Unfortunately in most cases this is where it stays, but some such machines have some level of hackability. One such is the 7th generation Kindle PaperWhite 3, for those [pragyaangaur] has produced a distro that gives it the Alpine Linux userspace and some other tricks.
As you might expect, the Kindle needs to be jailbroken, and is limited to the rather ancient Amazon kernel. The distro comes with some extras for the custom frontend. There is a selection of games, a browser, an ArXiv search client, an ePub reader, and Quill, a local chatbot that runs SmolLM2 via llama.cpp on the Kindle’s own processor. At 1.7 words per second, it may not be the fastest, but the most important thing is that everything stays on the device. Best of all, it’s easy enough to return your Kindle to stock if you tire of the distro.
A quick look at everyone’s favorite auction site will find these readers available for well under $100, so you should join in the fun, at least it shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. Meanwhile, Kindle hacking is somewhere we’ve taken you before.