[jfsantos]

I've used a Chrome OS device for a long time as my primary device. I'm a researcher and never do any "real" development besides some web stuff or writing code locally, though (most of my code runs on clusters). However, using just web stuff like Cloud9 was not for me, so one of the first things I did with my Chromebook was to install crouton.

If you need to run any specific stuff locally, get a Chromebook that has an Intel CPU, not an ARM. Some stuff (especially proprietary binaries) are not available for ARM. If you get a device with a touchscreen, Android apps sometime will be good enough for things that do not work well on Linux (e.g. Skype).