Since I primarily work with C, SQL, or Python, Chromebook and crouton has worked just fine as a development machine. The only drawback has been that I can't seem to natively get the terminal to support more than 16 colors, which makes vim look rather bland. I can enable the full 256 for use with the solarized settings if I use tmux (tmuxing to your localhost is rather strange, admittedly), but the lack of scrolling on tmux sessions is a little annoying.