If you are at all serious about piano I would recommend getting an 88 key keyboard with half decent keys. Anything less you'll outgrow in the first few months and you will be learning to properly orient yourself. On a smaller keyboard you're going to mess up your 'South Sight' and your 'North Sight' because you will train yourself to orient on the edges of your smaller keyboard. As soon as you sit down behind a proper piano you'll be confused.

Good keyboards aren't expensive any more, the simplest Yamaha, Casio and Roland that qualify for serious study are all around $500 if you shop around a bit and if you go for second hand can be had for half that. You'll very quickly match that in lesson costs so if you can afford the one you probably can afford the other.

You don't need sequencers, aftertouch, built in DAWs or controlling an external one etc, those are not aimed at piano students. Can be fun but complete luxury.

But it's a space where more expensive older hardware might still be worth it. E.g. my full piano size 24 year old Yamaha w/velocity sensitive keys and pedals still works flawlessly and the current version of it is still expensive new (at least from the point of view of a casual user...)

It's now connected via a cheap USB adapter to my Chromebook (biggest issue: latency of the - mostly Android - apps) planning to connect it to my Linux box instead.

Honest question, is there any possibility of easily installing Linux on a Chromebook?

No idea, I suspect that will very much depend on the manufacturer. I've never looked into it.

You can always install Linux on any Chromebook, or install a Linux VM (but that may not make it trivial to directly attach devices). To the best of my knowledge 100% of Chromebooks are fully supported.

Old schoolers use USB to ADB plus ADB to MIDI! ;)

https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/usb-adb-converters-t...

https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/3wefun/midi_i...