This is why I love ostree distributions so much for my laptop. Not only can I safely update in class, I once switched distributions twice in one day of classes with only like 30s of total downtime, I just waited for the professor to go off on a tangent I didn’t need to take notes about so I could reboot.
Sometime around android 9 they removed a bunch of sd card related features to make you have to do the weird combine with internal storage thing