I love my chromebook so I'm fairly interested in doing this. I have two questions:
1) How does having a chroot environment affect battery life? Does access to the Ubuntu tools cost a ton of battery?
2) After I go into developer mode can I still get updates to Chrome OS?
Article author here. Anecdotally the battery life takes a bit of a hit, but I've been running it pretty hard to get everything installed. I haven't done any tests. I have a suspicion that Chrome limits its CPU usage, and the chroot does not. That said, the battery life isn't completely shot in the chroot.
I got my Chromebook on Monday, so I haven't updated it after initial boot. I'm not sure about the updating issues, but you can always go into non-Developer Mode and update from there. If that causes problems for the chroot, it's really easy to back up the chroot (it's just a directory) and reinstall it with Crouton: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton#you-want-to-make-a-boot...
So in other words, I can't answer any of those questions yet, sorry!
Thanks for the preliminary response. I am very tempted to do all of this "hacker" stuff to my Chromebook but I'm worried that's a slippery slope. As is I have no local files, no battery worries, so it's essentially a maintenance free machine. Once I start doing local work I'm going to want more and more until it's basically just a netbook. I think it's maybe good for me to have a machine where I can't constantly be tinkering.
If you did this, would there be a significant lag from i/o? I assume sticking a Class 10 SD card in it and booting archARM would be pretty quick, but still slower than the SSD that ships with the machine.
Haven't tried on this machine specifically, but never noticed much lag as a result of running from USB on others. There is a USB3 port on the back if you're concerned about performance (just remember this is a $250 ARM laptop, not a MacBook Pro).
I've been thinking about getting a chromebook but as a macbook air user I'm not sure if it's worth it. Do you have any thoughts on an Air compared to the advantages of a chromebook?
It's hard to say. I bought the Chromebook because I have a Macbook Pro but I wanted something lighter, cheaper, and with better battery life to use in class and on the go. I really wanted a MacBook air but at $250 versus $1000+ I couldn't justify the upgrade. I think if you already have the MBA you can probably avoid the Chromebook for now as the use case is largely the same. However if you want something cheap and light to browse the internet and use Google Docs/SSH on the couch then go for it, you won't regret the purchase.
