I'm relatively uniquely qualified to weigh in here... I've been linux-native for decades now on my home desktops (debian), and the last time I used windows for work was ~2005-ish with work Mac laptops, and "disposable" chromebooks at home for personal use + travel.

1) It started with Crouton (open source, "let's get access to the underlying linux system"), and worked pretty well. IIRC you had to switch to "dev mode" to get access to it.

2) Crostini and all the layer-cake isolation is wildly impressive! ...it's more VM-based with suuuper adjudicated interaction boundaries between `chromeos` and the underlying linux vm.

Arch overview: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-library/guide...

Seneschal (file management/isolation): https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/HEA...

Sommelier (gui passthrough/punch-through): https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform2/+/HEA...

3) I've recently (intentionally) switched to their new "Baguette" beta VM/Container (you can talk to google AI mode about it, but general access docs and links are fairly sparse: "...a ChromeOS architectural shift (arriving around v142-146) that enables containerless Linux Virtual Machines, running directly via KVM instead of LXD. It removes the middle container layer for increased efficiency and flexibility, allowing for advanced features like direct PCI passthrough, while providing improved storage management compared to legacy Crostini."

4) I think over the last ~15 years I've gone from 4gb => 8gb => 16gb (just recently) and sticking with "premium-ish" dev-centric laptops (mostly: linux, git, web dev, inkscape, random hacking, etc). Currently the Acer Spin 714, previously Samsung XE930QCA... both "tablet adjacent" with full fliparound or "tent style" for watching a movie or doodling with styluses.

Bang-for-Buck, I was able to get the Spin714 for ~$300 @ 16gb ram (used-ish, off ebay) which is a STEAL, and similar story for the Samsung one. They're definitely very capable machines, and treating them as "dumb terminals with a VM I can pop open and scp files to a remote host or git push" is fantastic!

HOWEVER: beware! Google w/ Baguette is stupidly complicated on how to open a port on the device itself for other computers to be able to access servers on the local device. I argued with the google AI for like an hour trying to figure out the best way to allow `git pull my-chromebook.localdomain:./Git/some-repo` and eventually had to settle on a raw `ssh` reverse proxy pipe where I was pulling from `my-other-machine.localdomain:localhost:2222:./Git/some-repo` which was forwarded back (over SSH) to the chromebook itself.

It used to be that you could rationally: `python -m http`, open an "enable port forwarding" thingy in the terminal settings and be able to connect to the service w/o much ceremony. Nowadays they're effectively nanny-ifying the OS and it's getting much harder to do the same thing (removing visible UI for port forwarding, needing hidden settings deep links or `chrome://flags` stuff to be able to access a server/service RUNNING ON YOUR OWN MACHINE FROM WITHIN YOUR OWN NETWORK). Supposedly the cool kids are using tailscale or whatever, but it's literally `localhost<->localhost` and I don't want to have to set up a VPN or whatever to make that work, I just want to doodle on local web services in a VM on a machine that can get stolen and not end up losing all my personal/private files.

Also, ask google AI mode: "when is google phasing out chromebook and chromeos and presumably near-native linux support on their machines?" => """Court documents and executive statements reveal a plan to retire the existing ChromeOS software stack by 2034. This legacy system is expected to be replaced by a unified platform internally codenamed "Project Aluminium," which migrates ChromeOS fully onto the Android tech stack."""

...so ~8 more years of `chromeos`/`linux` and then it'll no longer be the year of linux on the desktop!

Yes, they can be very comfortable and very capable machines, but they're losing a bit of their central spirit and developer-friendliness over time.