I am not quite ready to switch to a GNU/Linux yet, but I have live booted Linux Mint Xfce yesterday, with most things working, but much worse for launching times, etc. Would it be any different if I installed it on my eMMC drive? Since they are both based on NAND flash memory, I am clueless about it.
Installed will be faster.
But you should note that emmc systems are not intended for heavy use. They have a much shorter wearout lifespan than SSDs. If you or your OS do a lot of writing to disk, you might end up with a failure.
Just be aware of that possibility, and have backups.