Sort of a related tangent:
Some of the best gaming time in my life has been on handheld consoles, even when the games were available on PC or TV.
I wish there was a modern platform (not just a hobbyist Raspberry Pi kit or something) in the Switch or DS form factor, that boots straight into a coding environment like the legendary Commodore 64 and other "computer-consoles" of that era, with a central app store for indie devs to publish to for free. Add in dedicated support from a game engine like Godot, and I think something like that could spark a renaissance of solo devs/buddy teams experimenting with new game ideas and stuff.
Probably the closest thing is a Steam Deck with a custom Linux distro.
> I wish there was a modern platform (not just a hobbyist Raspberry Pi kit or something) in the Switch or DS form factor, that boots straight into a coding environment like the legendary Commodore 64 and other "computer-consoles" of that era, with a central app store for indie devs to publish to for free.
I’m not sure if this will do what you want, but it is Linux on a DS! No active developers at the moment. They have instructions to build your own images as well as some software built for it.
There is the commander x16 from the 8-bit guy https://www.commanderx16.com/ although it’s not in a handheld form factor.