This post is basically just a "thank you" to the developers.
The device only kinda worked with most distros: no wifi/sound, lots of modules required blacklisting, generally unstable.
I booted up tiny core just to get some stuff of an old debian partition on it that no longer started, and tried the wifi tool just for fun. It connected, and works fine.
Now I have persistent dcore-stretch installed on it, and was able to get basically everything working-wifi,sound(terrible quality), suspend/resume, stable, wacom pen.
I had to make a small change to and build the openchrome driver so it would use the screens native resolution of 800x480, but that was it.
I have no idea why the ath5k module works fine for this device on tiny core and not on anything else I've tried, but I'' take it