At these specs I expect the price to be pretty hefty, what was your reason to go for a Chromebook instead of another laptop + Linux?

It’s really surprising to me when people suggest that ChromeOS is worse than some other Linux. To me it’s head and shoulders above all the rest, because all the drivers always work perfectly, the touchpad works perfectly when other Linux developers are still putting out press releases every time they fix something trivial in their incredibly broken multitouch input stacks, and all the binaries including the kernel are peak-optimized with profile guidance for every specific CPU platform. There is no Linux distribution that can touch ChromeOS.

Can you use it for ‘regular’ computer stuff like compile python modules or run random binaries?

I had a cheap ChromeBook I used for quite a while, basically until the battery gave out and it turned into a desktop machine, but chromeOS was pretty limited back then so I just threw fedora on it. Almost all my Blender dev work was on that poor little underpowered thing…

Yes, on most[1] hardware: https://chromeos.dev/en/linux

[1] Released since 2019 plus these: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/chro...

Yep, and it's incredibly easy to install. You just tap one button in the settings and wait a moment.

How well does it work without a Google account? Are there degoogled distributions that are likely to work, and alternative stores?

That would seem like the wrong tool for the job. I always say you pick your application, then the best operating system for it, then the best hardware for that, and I don't see any way to start from no Google account and end at ChromeOS. Using the Linux environment requires a signed-in (not guest) session and the only identity provider for ChromeOS of which I am aware is Google.

It was like 3,400 or something like that.

It's a work laptop, although I use it almost exclusively these days since I can easily use a "personal" profile. It's very easy to manage things like SSO/device policies on Chromebooks because of the GSuite integration.

There's pretty much nothing that it's "worse" at, other than in some niche scenarios - like there's a bug where the VM will return an invalid code for a specific CPUID, and it doesn't support nested virtualization, etc. Pretty niche stuff.

Otherwise... it works. Funny enough I'm now in quite a pickle with my Ubuntu laptop, which updated to a new kernel, failed, and now I can't roll back to the previous kernel. Because of this, virtually no drivers are working, so I can't connect to the internet... making it really really fun to deal with! Stuff like this doesn't really happen on my Chromebook.