Every now and again woot.com sells the 5th generation Amazon Fire tablet (from 2015), and a couple of weeks ago it popped up for $16 + taxes/fees.

I bought one and it turns out that you can flash an unofficial older version of LineageOS, which is still being maintained for this device, and get a surprisingly good little tablet running 100% FOSS (well except the bootloader depending on which Fire OS version it has).

I wrote up a short guide in case anyone else is interested:

  https://gist.github.com/Juul/3f93655efb8d99b89a29168dd255b5a2

Beware that I haven't verified this procedure on the latest Fire OS versions since the tablet i got didn't have the latest version and I didn't want to tempt fate. From forum reports it doesn't seem like woot is shipping tablets with the latest firmware anyway, but I can't say with any certainty. If you get one, just make sure you keep the WiFi disabled until the guide tells you to turn it on, to prevent it from auto-updating.

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marc/juul