I thought I'd bricked it ...

 Well, despite my worries about installing Linux on an eMMc based machine I bit the bullet and installed Ubuntu on my Lenovo IdeaPad 1, which I'd been using as a lightweight travel computer until it started running out of swap space.

I deliberately chose Ubuntu due to its particularly good hardware support and user friendly graphical installer. While debian based distros are as good if not better, when you run into technical problems they tend to require some advanced technical knowledge that I no longer possess.

The installation went well and Ubuntu recognised the system and the disk but when it came time to restart after installation  it  simply didn't work.

The machine kept looping on boot, flashing a message, shutting down and restarting.

However, after some frantic googling, it turned out that the fix was nothing to do with it being an eMMc based machine, but to disable Intel platform trust technology  in the bios, as in this post about installing Mint on related hardware https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=395951.

following the bouncing ball gave me a working machine,

Up to now I've only ever installed Linux on older machines that lacked the security chip. I'm guessing that was we start to see ex Windows 11 machines - all of which have the security chip turned on by default - being sidegraded to Linux, this problem will become more common ...

[update 22/03/2024]

Since the intention is to use it as an alternative to the lightweight machine, this afternoon I installed Notable, Ristretto, Focuswriter and Kate,

As Ubuntu's backup utility is in fact Deja Dup, it only required to be configured. As always I located the Notable data directory in ~/Documents.

Rather than my One drive account, I decided to back it up to my Google drive account to see how that worked.

Unlike the lightweight machine I also configured Thunderbird to make the machine that little bit more general purpose.