they're ok but if you just want to play with electronics uarts/i2c/gpios then you might as well get a Zero2W and if you actually want to run games on it then the 5 is massively overpriced compared to rivals or even actual minipcs.

Making Linux distros that's not raspbian work is a pain in the ass if you have to deal with uboot and device trees. If you're going to all that effort you might want to look at better walnutpi or radxa SBC hardware.