It's hit-and-miss, as with any other Linux-based mass-market device. For example, the ARM-based Samsung Chromebook used a Mali graphics chip that only had a bi

It's hit-and-miss, as with any other Linux-based mass-market device. For example, the ARM-based Samsung Chromebook used a Mali graphics chip that only had a binary blob graphics driver (maybe an Android one?) that had a ugly nonfree license on it. IIRC, custom code for each device can be found in the main chromium tree somewhere; extracting those bits and using them with a standard Linux distro is painful at best; e.g. locking you to specific kernel revisions for binary driver compatibility. It reminds me of the win/softmodem shenigans we saw in the late 90s. Virtually every Chromebook has a hardware or software developer mode that lets you boot an unsigned operating system. Developer mode is rather intrusive (sad face; full screen message; beeps if you don't dismiss it early enough so that you can't do it to install malware on a lay user's laptop without them noticing) but usually can be quickly dismissed with Ctrl-D on each boot-up. There exists some very nice hardware that is built from standard components and/or will run well on standard drivers. As a starting point, prefer x86_64-based Chromebooks over ARM based ones if you're going to run a Linux distro on them.