[dTal]

I keep seeing this meme, and it persuaded me to buy a Samsung Chromebook, specifically with the intent of putting Linux on it.

It's awful. Forget about accelerated graphics from that nice chip - the drivers are proprietary. Oh, and so are the DSP drivers, so no HD decoding. Enjoy pressing Ctl-D every boot; don't mis-type or you'll wipe the drive. The keyboard lacks essentials such as "home", "end", and "delete". The Crouton OS and ChromeOS get into fights sometimes. HDMI is a crapshoot. I never did get VLC to stream the webcam. The finish is about as durable as whitewash. And so on.

If you're a developer reading this thread and considering buying a Chromebook because it looks like a nice machine for the price, PLEASE don't. Do yourself a favor and buy a used thin 'n' light business-class laptop from 2006-8. You'll take a medium hit on battery life and weight, but you will get a comfortable, well-designed, durable, powerful machine for your money.

[DennisP]

I use mine to take notes and do a little programming at the command line. I use vim so I don't need those "keyboard essentials." I'm doing nothing with graphics or video. I'm writing text and code.

That stuff is what "work" means to me, so my (Acer) chromebook is a pretty decent work machine. For bigger stuff I break out the 17" System76 but for travel I take the chromebook.

[ewoodrich]

The parent is using Crouton on Acer c720, which has an x86 (Haswell) processor, and is much closer in performance to a modern netbook. The Samsung Chromebook has a fairly dated ARM processor, and the performance on Ubuntu isn't great, but acceptable for my uses (Python and Javascript coding in vim, running a dev server, testing with Chromium). You're not going to have much luck with anything that expects hardware acceleration, but you can switch back to the ChromeOS side with two keystrokes.

I agree with your recommendation though, wait and get the Samsung 2 if you want ARM, or any of the other x86 Chromebooks.

EDIT: And you don't need to type Ctrl-D, it just makes it boot quicker when the bootloader is unlocked

[_paulc]

If you only use the CLI (using crosh) it works fine.