There is a Nova launcher beta: https://novalauncher.com/beta

Yeah I think so. There are some optimisations that can be done to improve things, but at the end of the day it’s running off a slow USB drive

I’ve just got Arch Linux installed on a USB drive. I set it up so it works with both UEFI and legacy BIOS boot. It works great - I can install whatever tools I need on it, I can even use it as a little portable Linux drive if I need that. I’ve also used it to install Arch on a number of my computers.

The only issue is that the USB drive is pretty slow, so it’s not the best experience using it

These look awesome! I’m curious what your favourite switches are out of the bunch? I’m also interested in a comparison between the Boba U4T vs MMD princess, if you have any thoughts to share!

I doubt it - the bootloader is very different on iPads and I don’t think it would let you boot a different OS