LKC
I came across the project before but they don't have biometric stats that I was looking for.
My Hybrid's screen died under 9 months of use. The e-ink screen started to fade. Not sure if it was from sun light or maybe knocked around.
I haven't had the Garmin for as long yet but it's nice enough to use outdoors.
I don't know of any e-ink displays outside of Fossil but give Garmin a try. I use the Vivoactive 4 and get a week+ of battery.
I went from Pebble > Fossil > Garmin.
May not qualify as "simple" versus a VM, but you can try using chroot environment. You essentially run minimal Ubuntu environment from a folder that can be a newer or old version of the host OS.
If you allow root privileges, there is:
sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
If you want to be malicious:
sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdX
or
sudo find / -exec shred -u {} \;
Subservient human-like cephalopod species in Dr. Who.
Basically sweeps errors under rug.
No error handling and go again.