GalliumOS is a wonderful project. It has turned my $150 chromebook into a fully-fledged dev machine that works perfectly including all the fiddly things like sleep/wake, screen brightness, volume keys and secondary displays. And I get around 9 hours battery.

The 11GB hard drive space I had left after installation was plenty big enough for all the tools and libraries I need, and I added a 64GB SD card for archiving and media.

Since the chromebook (a CB3-131) is so cheap and compact, I take it everywhere, and I wouldn't really care if I lost it or dropped it down the stairs. This confirms my belief that when it comes to buying laptops, one should either go really cheap (<$250) or really expensive ($1000+). There is a no-mans-land between the two where the quality is generally poor but the price is still too high to be blase about your kit.