You can install GalliumOS for a full Ubuntu installation if you get an x86 one, and the ARM ones can still run Linux chroots behind ChromeOS. Most of my Chromeb

You can install GalliumOS for a full Ubuntu installation if you get an x86 one, and the ARM ones can still run Linux chroots behind ChromeOS. Most of my Chromebooks don't have Chrome installed, and I say 'most' because you can buy like 3 or 4 of them for the price of a more fully-featured machine. ChromeOS isn't great, but the hardware offers a great mix of performance with low size and cost. The push to get them into educational environments also means that they often prioritize things like spill-proof keyboards and shock-proof chasses. And they also usually have fairly good physical security; most of them have a screw on the motherboard that you have to open the device and remove to reflash the boot firmware. Like I said, the main difficulty with iPads is that you don't get many options for what you run on them. And as for performance, I use mine for development and EDA, and speed has never been a huge concern over the years. I even get a reasonable 40fps when I'm working on my toy 3D game engine. Just because they ship with bloatware doesn't mean they aren't real computers... https://wiki.galliumos.org/ https://wiki.galliumos.org/