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.

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?

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.

Depending on the chromebook, upgrading to a bigger ssd is pretty inexpensive.

I have a acer c720 with arch installed alongside chromeos on a $50 128GB ssd: http://www.amazon.com/MyDigitalSSD-Super-Cache-Solid-State/d...

All together I spent $150 for a surprisingly performant on the go machine. The battery life is pretty great as well.

You don't need to buy those off-brand SSDs anymore. 250Gb SSDs have crossed below the 100$ mark now.

Stick one of these in it. 256GB = $80.

http://www.amazon.com/PNY-Elite-Performance-256GB-Speed/dp/B...)

I found a model of the Acer C720 with 4GB RAM and it's been my only computer for the last 5 months. The 32GB SSD is not great, but xubuntu + all my dev environment still leaves 40% free. Browsing is fine, never had performance problems when editing either. It runs Clojure on the JVM without issues, but I've never tried/needed to run a full blown IDE. That said, it happily runs Minecraft on medium settings.

There are still a few hiccups with hibernation. Using a tiling WM meant I needed to remap all of the chrome keys to get stuff like brightness and volume working.

I got it refurbished for £120 (~$170) before I set off backpacking in Asia and it's been the perfect laptop. Lightweight and decent battery life.

I do a lot of vector drawing and the trackpad fidelity isn't great, but that's hardly something you can ask for on such a cheap little machine.

I had an Acer C720 for one year in 2014-2015, and ran elementaryOS on it. It was my primary dev machine.

Resources were pretty limited (dual core Celeron, 2Gb RAM, 32Gb SSD) but it ran fine for most of the things (like normal browsing, js and Python development).

Things you CAN'T do on it:

  - Java. Just don't even think about it.
  - the former point implies all the Java IDEs (Eclipse, Intellij)
  - Android, because of disk space and everything else.
  - Games.

Why I loved it:

  - really small and light
  - AMAZING battery life
  - having so little disk space made me pay attention to my usage of it, make backups, and move on a server things I didn't really need.

However I upgraded to a Dell XPS 13 since then, life is much much better now :)

I have an Acer c720 too and I run Java on it. Minecraft, believe it or not runs at 40fps. But I had to find the proprietary drivers.

Are you still running elementaryOS on the XPS? If so, how well does it work?

It works really well - I'm basically in love with Pantheon (which IMHO it's much better than GNOME), and I can't recall encountering any bug in the last year.

However, since it's based on Ubuntu 14.04 the kernel and the software versions are a bit old.

In the next months I will switch to Arch or Nix or Void (to have more recent versions) and I may try to port Pantheon on them.

On my laptop, I basically use a web browser and ssh (well, mosh). Sometimes I download a movie, but I store them long-term in "teh clouds" so I don't care much about disk space.