Google's PixelBook could be a good option if you don't have any need for Windows. It will run Linux easily via crouton.
My one supports NVME in both slots so I don't know what other people on the internet who are saying the 12 inch doesn't support NVME are on about. I have the Kaby Lake version.
I have a 8GB swap which I guess is fast enough as its on the second NVME.
basic scripting works fine, but quite a few things fail. The most recent one i stumbled on was kivy [1]. It couldn't start X-Sessions to open any windows.
Just hazarding a guess, but are you using the xiwi X11 replacement? That's just a dummy x server, with everything forwarded to a chrome app. Its a hack to get around the chromeos switch from x to a custom wayland'ish display server. Pretty slow.
But with crouton, you can also run a full xorg on vt-2. And I would be very surprised if anything failed to run there (from a graphical perspective). Even steam with full hardware acceleration works.
I've since installed galliumOs though, so I can't test anymore.