Yep, that's what I did on my Dell 11 (wolf) with Xubuntu and almost everything working out of the box.I just created a vanilla Xubuntu USB, turned on developer mode and made a bios patch (the Dell has a bug, other Chromebooks don't require it), and installed.

After installation, I had to run something like two scripts to get the trackpad and suspend working.

Battery life is not 10+ hours as it is with chromeOS, probably closer to 7/8.

Further reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/chrubuntu/ (I didn't follow the Chrubuntu instructions, but used the community to get a touchpad fix) and https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromebook

Yes, there's even a customized Ubuntu distro just for Acer C720:

https://www.distroshare.com/distros/get/14/

It's a great Linux machine. Everything works out of the box.

Yes, you can. And Chrubuntu has great driver support for the c720 and other popular models, but I still ran into some bugs with suspend and Wifi, so I stick with a chroot.

Not properly. I wouldn't waste your time and get a Windows machine instead which are a lot more Linux-friendly.