It's likely the resist fingerprinting option. It breaks many websites or those that use bot checking thing.
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.
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/sdXorsudo find / -exec shred -u {} \;
Those features can be disabled to ease up on resources.