Obviously there's no-one in the world that didn't know this was coming, but even so, I feel for the Remix OS guys.

I assumed at the time their objective was to be acqui-hired by Google, but I can't see why there would be a reason for that now, or how they'd hope to compete in this situation.

Congratulations to the Chrome O/S and Android teams. I was briefly on a Chromebook when my laptop packed in, and but for the absence of solid developer tools, I'd have stayed forever. There's a lot to be said for convenience.

"but for the absence of solid developer tools, I'd have stayed forever."

Are you saying that Arch or Ubuntu and everything that runs on them aren't enough for you? Or that crouton hadn't evolved far enough at the time?

These days you can run crouton in a window or a tab within ChromeOS. Launch an xterm or IntelliJ or whatever each into their own windows, displaying within ChromeOS.

I'd say that the 2015 Pixel (plus crouton) is one of the best ultrabooks for devs.

I must say Intellij was what I was thinking of primarily.

Have you got a link?

Previously when I looked at this, Crouton required me to root the Chromebook and effectively switch to Linux rather than run it under Chrome O/S.

If that's changed (which from your post it sounds like it has), then I need to have another look at this!

As far as switching to linux rather than run under Chrome OS, I guess that depends on what you mean. Include "xiwi" as one of your components when installing crouton, and you can launch android studio and have it run within the chroot, but display as a window on your chromeOS desktop. Its not visually attractive but functionally i'd say its very well integrated. It 'feels' likes its running directly on chromeos.

Sorry I can't recommend any particular link aside from https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton, but I think its worth a bit of googling to find discussions relevant to any questions you may still have.