Acer c720 owner here - people tend to mock chromebooks all the time as glorified web browsers.

To some extend, that's true. Most things I do that aren't development related are done on a web browser. It's absolutely perfect for that. Starts up extremely quickly, very light, long battery, lovely.

For very occasional dev purposes, I simply used crouton, which works insanely well. I can even use sshfs and go back to ChromeOS and have the drive still mounted. Highly recommend the c720, or whatever is the more recent equivalent.