Next time you want to sail the high seas with Minecraft, try HMCL. Should be less of a hassle.

If you are on Plasma 6, it should be “System Settings” - Keyboard - Advanced, select “Configure keyboard options”, and you’ll find the “Caps Lock behavior” - maybe even two, but one of them have a lot of options as to what you want to do with your Caps Lock key.

Xournal++ supports other architectures. They might not have compiled binaries for other architectures ready to be downloaded on their GitHub release, but it’s packaged on at least postmarketOS (i.e. Alpine Linux) edge (I have it on my “Chromebook”) and Debian Stable.

I have a Samsung Chromebook that also has ARM SoC, 4 GB of soldered RAM and eMMC storage. I installed postmarketOS on it, with desktop KDE Plasma 6, and with 4 GB of ZRAM, it is definitely usable - I could run Xournal++ without much problem. It’s not butter smooth, the scrolling can be stuttery, but it should be enough for light notetaking. Granted, my SoC is older and weaker (RK3399), so your mileage may vary.

From what I can find it has a quad-core Cortex-A7 ARM32 chip, a.k.a Mediatek MT8321, with 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of storage, which is not plenty for a device running Android 8.

Your best bet for running “Linux OS” is postmarketOS. But the ARM world is a lot different than the x86 world that you might be familiar with: you can’t just “install” any OS on an ARM platform, you need to port it (write code & tweak config) for each device. And the only device that has the same SoC does not look good.

So you next best choice is probably Termux. It could be installed on any Android devices, and provides a decent “Linux” environment that are pretty close to a real Linux console. Of course, it’s really difficult to run GUI applications, and running things like Docker would probably be out of the questions (ARM32 already had pretty rough Docker support as-is). But still, it’s a good way to get your hands dirty with Linux, and you can definitely use them for quite a few things: writing C or Python code on the go, get familiar with command line, or just run a few small services (e.g. SSH for remote connection, NginX for web server). The possibilities are still endless.

Now, as for the de-googling part, you will still need a custom ROM for this, and I’m not even sure if your device even support flashing third-party ROMs (some carriers would lock it down), so it might not be possible to flash an entire new OS, but someone else seemed to have already posted a potential ROM you could try. Still, you can still find some tutorials that can help you disable as much Google as possible with ADB command, which you might need to adapt to your specific device.