@BeaverTek, you definitely want to follow the progress on the PineTab and PineNote. Last I checked, PINE64 was having trouble getting parts to produce the PineTab and it is going to take a while to get good Linux support for the RK3566 in the PineNote, but they will run a standard Linux stack and many distros. However, they will never be waterproof, and FOSS text-to-speech is subpar and I don’t know of any good proprietary text-to-speech that runs in Linux.
My advice is to install LineageOS on a tablet if you need something today. I bought a Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014) to install LineageOS and then discovered that Verizon had locked its bootloader, so you need to be careful what you buy.