One Card to Rule Them All: How spruceOS Learned to Live Everywhere

Retro handhelds have a funny habit of becoming inseparable from their software. Buy one little Linux machine and, before long, the firmware becomes almost as much a part of its personality as the plastic shell, buttons or screen. Onion became synonymous with the Miyoo Mini, MinUI has followed Shaun Inman across a small army of devices, and for a long time spruce felt similarly tied to the Miyoo A30 it originally grew around.That relationship has changed quite dramatically. spruceOS 4.5.0 officially brings the PowKiddy RGB30, RGB20SX and Miniloong Pocket 1 into its stable hardware family, while the project has also been spreading across Miyoo, TrimUI and Anbernic devices, with still more hardware being experimented with behind the scenes. Offline RetroAchievements have appeared, the software underneath spruce has become considerably more varied, and the idea of what spruce actually is has grown along with all of that.Somewhere along the way, spruce stopped feeling like firmware for one…