old Dell chromebook

I converted an old Dell chromebook sometime back, removed the "screw", reflashed bios via mrchromebox, etc. At time I installed MX cause it was only thing that let sound come out of the speakers. It has tiny 16GB eMMC. Never really used it cause of small storage space and its kinda slow.

Well nuked MX and installed my Bookworm Dog with Waydroid (not hard just copied "live" and "changes" and grub.conf) It works, Waydroid works. Has a whopping 8GB free space.

So noticed it has SD card slot. And yes the mrchromebox UEFI bios will boot linux from an SD card. Downside, SD cards kinda suck for this purpose. Well unless you have newer top of line one. Still slower than a thumbdrive. You would be happier booting from thumbdrive or usb SSD. Honestly even an old mechanical laptop hard drive is faster than SD card. But SD card is more portable, can even leave it in slot if you have one of those shorty adapters for the mini SD card. If you have only mini SD slot and the mini SD card sticks out, not lot you can do. But a mini SD card is well very mini. I will mention though the converted chromebook can boot from SD card, my HP Stream which originally had windows, can not. Again the idea of these was to force people into the cloud to rent space and apps, not upgrade it to use as normal laptop. Cloudbook was just windows version of a Chromebook.

Truly annoying how manufacturers went out of their way to make the chromebooks/cloudbooks very unfriendly to hardware updates. Only few models, older models, can you update storage cause they use real SSD instead of soldered eMMC. And couple models slot for standard RAM rather than have it soldered to motherboard.

On other hand they sold these Chromebooks by the millions to schools, and they are lot heavier duty than consumer cloudbooks as they have to stand up to use by careless kids.