ChromeOS has natively supported running full linux containers for a several years, with basically full GUI support. You can essentially treat it as a normal linux dev machine whose browser lives outside your chroot.
I'll admit to salivating over this way of working, all the grunt happening somewhere else but my keystrokes being low latency (since they're locally rendered and lazily synced by the web browser).
But anyone who says a chromebook is comparable to a macbook is smoking something.
I'm not even saying that as an Apple Lover, I use linux, but I'm aware of the limitations of the platforms.
IME most people use macs not because they think they're better than everyone else; but because the development experience is very "happy path" -- and the hardware build quality is high.
