A few typos and omissions that I'll correct later:
I ended up running it with a 512G micro SD card (not an SSD as I mis-state once)
It has a micro-HDMI port and runs fine in dual screen mode.
One of the pics is with the heatsink (not just the fan per my typo) removed to show the motherboard.
Oh and the case is very thin, but aluminium and should hold up fairly well I hope.
Finally the keyboard layout is very different from the usual, but it fits in all the important keys and I felt like I could get used to it quite quickly with a bit more exposure.
I'd love it if this form factor caught on again (but I hope mousekeys get upgraded to real mouse events asap).
It's good to see the kind of info that's not likely to be available from a manufacturer.
Especially findings that really need experimentation to pin down :)
I would try a very high performance USB 3 stick instead of SD, and carefully (write 200000 sectors of of zeros to it first, then reboot and) partition it and format with data blocks aligned similarly to how a SSD is optimized by tools that actually do it properly.
Factory formatting on USBs are often very shoddy so it can make a big difference.
When it's good it boots and runs faster than a HDD and not much slower than an internal SSD.
SD cards have gotten more optimized for FAT filesystems than ever, and they should really be formatted using the app downloadable from the SD Association itself. There's a Linux version of the app but it still formats FAT or exFAT but not EXTx or even NTFS.
That could move it up a notch.
I'd want to try one with Windows and see if that will control the fan, a 64GB USB would be enough for that.
Thanks for the performance tips, but oddly (?) it's quite bearable as-is. While it does take about 20 seconds to get from just-logged-in to clean start Firefox, it's completely fine once it's running. I guess 12G is still a reasonable amount of memory and so I'm mainly reading from cache after that.
Terminal apps are completely fine. I haven't tried running IntelliJ but the screen size was always going to be a problem for that so I'm more likely to run things in the bare terminal or from vim or something (I just started playing with Helix and like what I see).
So at the moment I'm using ext4 on the SD Card and I'll likely stick with that. If it feels too slow my next attack would be to take a needle file to the dodgy m2 card slot and see if I can get it working again. Failing that, though, I'll try your suggestions.
I ended up running it with a 512G micro SD card (not an SSD as I mis-state once)
It has a micro-HDMI port and runs fine in dual screen mode.
One of the pics is with the heatsink (not just the fan per my typo) removed to show the motherboard.
Oh and the case is very thin, but aluminium and should hold up fairly well I hope.
Finally the keyboard layout is very different from the usual, but it fits in all the important keys and I felt like I could get used to it quite quickly with a bit more exposure.
I'd love it if this form factor caught on again (but I hope mousekeys get upgraded to real mouse events asap).