> Since then, I've been very skeptical of the notion of buying chromebooks as cheap and lightweight mobile working tools.

You have to be careful about which processor powers your Chromebook if you want to do non chrome os things. The processors from the mainstream core line (Haswell, Skylake) etc do pretty well, although they're usually fairly low clocked. The chromebooks with Atom or ARM processors usually have a harder time booting other things, and the ARM linux ecosystem is a lot trickier than the x86-64 ecosystem.

Avoiding Atom processors is harder than it looks, because Intel keeps changing the branding, probably to confuse users.