I have an Acer C720 Chromebook on which I tinkered with crouton, before re-purposing the device as a YouTube player for my toddler. It was a cheap little novel

I have an Acer C720 Chromebook on which I tinkered with crouton, before re-purposing the device as a YouTube player for my toddler. It was a cheap little novelty that I enjoyed playing with for awhile, but I just don't fully understand the impulse to turn these things into Linux development workstations. You have to more or less root the device... press a Ctrl key combo during every boot in order to keep it rooted... and then open a shell and type a sequence of commands to enter a crouton Linux session. Look, I have fond memories of using Slackwhare back in the 90's, and feeling like a wizard every time I figured out how to make my PC do something it wasn't "supposed to do". So I assume that hacker ethos is much of the appeal. However, today Acer sells the Aspire One Cloudbook for the same price as the Acer Chromebook I bought two years ago. It's 14" instead of 11", has the same battery life, and is a full unlocked Windows PC (easily replaceable with Linux). So if you just want a cheap Linux PC with good battery life, why in the world wouldn't you go that route rather than buying a locked Chromebook and jumping through all the hoops? Using a Pixel would be even more bizarre, because at that point you're in the Macbook Pro price range. Chromebooks are well-suited for school students, and non-technical business people at companies that revolve around Google Apps. You CAN squeeze those square pegs into round holes as a programmer, but it really doesn't make any practical sense to do so today.