yeah its very possible, Take a blow torch and arch linux iso (you need wizard to take it out of your pc you can find the wizard hiding in your tor browser he built a house inside of the tor browser.) then take a blowtorch and burn the iso into the pc front now it should be running arch btw.
$500 might be a stretch, It weren't for the horrible keyboard, and horrible screen, it might be worth putting a raspberry pi into as a sleeper project.
It does seem like it'd be pretty cool, though much rather them than me lol. I think shoving an rpi inside though would really betray the implicit spirit of the project. That would just be "can a raspberry pi run linux when I put in a plastic case shaped like a children's toy?" The answer would pretty obviously be yes. People are saying the processor in it means it probably couldn't run Linux which would make it a bit of a non-starter but there apparently other OSs that could be made to run on that kind of processor and that'd be cool to see.
I don’t know. You should make sure it doesn’t have a Realtek Wi-Fi card. Otherwise, it looks fine. I found the Linux Hardware report for it here: https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=7144bb41
I think the price to performance doesn’t look the best, though. Maybe go for a Thinkpad instead?
I think it’s mistly okay. I had a bit of misery with my 8852BE on my new Thinkpad E16 (the card would just disconnect from the system until the next reboot occasionally), which was solved with some kernel parameters I found online.
If it’s like the older vtech educational toys it uses some z80 processor, so you won’t be able to run Linux but you can a few different hobbyist microcomputer operating systems like zeal8bit and fuzix.
Realistically with that screen size you could put anything in that thing. How do you get the impression that it might be a little smaller than it looks though.