If you are looking at ESP8266 then Linux is too big by far. I'd suggest looking at FreeRTOS. It is not a full featured OS but it does have a scheduler that you have a hope of understanding, code for task switching and the bonus of exploring a real-time OS, and it fits on a ESP8266.

Super Lloyd wrote:

is there that many normal non IT user using Linux out there?

When the disk failed on my wife's underpowered vista laptop I slapped Ubuntu on it and she loved it. I was much faster and was fine for everything she needed (browsing, writing a few documents). The only problem she had was sending / receiving documents in Microsoft word format - mainly because other people were not used to importing docs in other formats. My wife is most definitely not a IT person.

That's the point, they need a warrant specific to a suspect. Currently they just slurp up everyone's activity _without_ a warrant

Why not store them in a database? You could use SQL to find the best match... :)