| Coming from linux and developing for linux, I don't share the authors experience. I mainly bought my chromebook convertible for university for notetaking. But now I am also doing all my freelance development work on open-source high availability and fault tolerance (qemu colo[1] if you're interested) on this thing. And it works great, the linux VM is very capable with seamless file, wayland and X11 passtrough. Nested virtualization works too. Sure, it's not native but I don't see a reason why it should be. Google is actually caring about security here, you see it in every part and decision of ChromeOS. Google is taking VM based isolation to the mainstream and showing that a secure OS without ransomware is possible. And the defaults are well done. The terminal app has infinite scrollback by default and is not too far off of xterm. The touchpad experience is excellent, switching between tabs, going forwards and backwards in history, switching virtual desktops and apps all done with a few gestures. And don't forget the fonts, ChromeOS is worth it for the fonts alone :). Noto Sans Mono is the default monospace font system-wide, even in the linux VM. It looks awesome in emacs. The maintainers of the linux part are very friendly, they will actually fix bugs you report. And that ChromeOS as a comercial/consumer OS has a public bug tracker at all, makes it very unique. Try that with windows :). If you want a excellent out-of-the box (with few exceptions*) linux experience, buy a chromebook. Especially if you want more exotic hardware like convertible with pen input. About the LaCrOs switch: I suspect the reason why Chrome was so deep integrated into the OS, is because there weren't any good graphics protocols (besides X11 which is meh.) when it launched so Chrome became application and window manager and compositor in one. And now that wayland has matured they are switching to it. * You're not going to get direct hardware access from the linux VM, so things like running wireshark on your wlan interface, mounting a harddrive that isn't plain exfat or ext4, etc. won't work. [1] https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/COLO |