[jlarsen]

I've been using a Chromebook Pixel (64GB version) as my primary work machine since I received it in 2013, first running Debian and now Arch. You'd be surprised at how well it's held up:

-It only has 4GB of RAM, but that's been enough up to now. Most builds are I/O bound anyway, and the SSD is fast.

-I don't use an external monitor, as the high pixel density of the screen more than makes up for the small size.

-The 64GB can be limiting, but in some ways its been beneficial, as its forced me to actually pay attention to backups.

-These days, if I have a long-running/high-resource process, I just spin up a VPS and run it there.

I think Google was pretty prescient with the Pixel laptops. When this one isn't enough, I'll be upgrading to the 2015 model.

[AdmiralAsshat]

Fellow 2013 Pixel owner here. Are you using the crouton-arch fork or did you install Arch natively? I ask because I was considering giving crouton-arch a shot, but it looks like it's about a year behind the upstream crouton packages, and considering crouton itself periodically breaks under ChromeOS updates, I don't expect chargh to be very stable.

What's your experience?

[jlarsen]

Native install for me. I can't compare it with crouton, as I've never even really used ChromeOS. The first thing I did was replace it with Debian. I'm pretty happy with what I have now, though. Everything works out of the box with Arch.

If you're on the fence about going native, you should do what I do: install arch on an SD card and boot from that. Good SD cards these days are plenty fast too, and if you like the native system, you can keep using it from the SD card, or use it to install Arch on the SSD. Just make sure you get an SD card with TRIM, and it'll work fine for long-term use.