Have a look at iSpy

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.

Here is one guide to get up and running.

This guide is easier to follow IMO.