These "Windows" laptops make perfectly fine Linux machines. (Even web browsing with Firefox tends to be very manageable on as little as 4GB RAM and even a slow CPU.) It's still unreasonably hard to install an alternative OS on a Chromebook and not end up with a useless toy that will literally prompt you to wipe its storage clean at every subsequent boot unless you quickly press some obscure key combination. Yes, there might be some ways to replace the firmware and stop it from doing that, but it's just not a sensible design overall.