Chromebooks - yes or no?

some of us prefer not to watch videos at 240p resolution

They've given us both cheap and high-end ARM laptops that come with coreboot on them. Pretty good once you install GNU/Linux on them.

Im currently looking at chromebooks that have access to android apps. I need a budget laptop for document writing, excel and PDFs so it looks like a chromebook running android office, OneNote, and onedrive would do what I need. I just dont want to buy a chromebook if I can get a windows laptop that performs as good if not better for the same price. It looks like a similarly specd chromebook will run better than a windows laptop though and not need as much space.

I spent $500 on a Samsung Chromebook Pro AMA

Underrated

How the fuck do you use actual Word on a Chromebook?

This. Or just get a Thinkpad, even cheaper.

Yes, especially if you can find a '13 or '15 Pixel book for cheap. ChromeOS is decently fast for doing everyday browsing/emails/etc, but you can easily change the bootloader and get the linux distro of your choice in there. I ran arch on a '15 Pixelbook for 3 years and it worked fantastically.

If you can find a few specific models, you can run Windows on it if you really want. There's some resources out there for finding the right model, this might help too

coolstar.org/chromebook/windows.html

Office 365 gives you the webapps that function pretty close to Google Docs.

Just remember that the Android versions of MS Office apps are - while decent - still cut down versions of the desktop software, optimised for touch (so simple operations like cutting & pasting text don't work the same way as they do on desktop) and you must pay the Office 365 subscription fee to be able to use them.
I used a cheap chromebook (Acer CB14) as my main laptop and it's pretty great. At least, it's more enjoyable to use than a shitty HP Stream or some other cheap Windows 10 laptop you'd get for the same price.

I am a digitard yet was able to use Crouton to install Linux on it, which only took about 45 minutes. I uninstalled it because Linux is absolutely fucking useless, but whatever floats your boat.

>have Word and Excel documents in Dropbox
>pensively double click on them on my Chromebook
>Office online opens
>suddenly I am editing them in MS Office online, barely different to the desktop software
>have paid not Office 365 fee or even have MS account

pretty good desu, obviously you must be online to do so

Been running a Dell Chromebook 11 w/ GalliumOS installed for about a year now as my note taking laptop for university.

Overall impressions: they're functional little machines when you throw Linux onto them, albeit really only useful for low power tasks such as web browsing and word processing. My favorite aspect of it is how light and compact they are which makes carrying them around super easy. And if it breaks out you're only out