Among other things. My first question was, is the hardware open? Couldn't find an answer to that.
Edit: Apparently revision 2 of Purism will possibly have Coreboot.
The figures were about 1500 CPU-seconds for the desktop and 3000 CPU-seconds for the Chromebook. Of course, wall-clock time was significantly less for the desktop due to having many more cores, but that's showing that per-core, the high-end Intel was only about twice as fast as the ARM.
I do development work on the Chromebook, via a Debian chroot inside Crouton. And you know what? It's fine. It's probably the fastest laptop I've ever owned. The filesystem's a little slow, but compilation speeds are perfectly adequate.
Try a native install on the Flip, it is nice: http://kmkeen.com/c100p-tweaks/
> The C100P Flip is the best netbook I have seen in eight years.
That's quite the praise! This thing must be really good.
> The default ALSA config was completely silent. Enabling Right Speaker Mixer Right/Left DAC fixed that. Supposedly there is a risk of burning out the amp if you thoughtlessly enable every option.
Uhh... wow. Well, OK.
> After suspend/resume, wifi will not work if the btsdio module was automatically loaded.
The best netbook in eight years, yet it can't even suspend/resume properly? What?
> The best video output mode is X11 video output. Despite what everyone says about being slow, this is the only driver that doesn't have major desync problems.
> Stellarium would run at a buttery smooth 60 FPS for a few minutes and then everything would die.
> Chromium will not run on this hardware.
> Screen rotation through xrandr doesn't work at all...
Then under "Things to Fix":
> - HMDI output. Very wonky, usually crashes X11 after a few minutes.
> - USB ethernet. The cdc_ether module will load but nothing happens.
> - Webcam. Crazy bucket of fail here. Maybe 25% of the time fswebcam can grab a single frame. Good luck with video.
> - Multitouch on the panel. No idea how to get that working.
To me, —even with the fixes and workarounds you describe— that device sounds like a nightmare to use.
And then if I want to use a real OS, I switch to my fullscreen Debian installation running awesome and all my xterms and it all just seamlessly interoperates. Except I don't need NetworkManager or PulseAudio or any of that nonsense because ChromeOS does it all for me. The brightness buttons work! The audio volume buttons work! Suspend and resume works! Everything works! There's even two-way clipboard support! Which works!
I've been using Linux for years, and I think this is the first time I have ever had a Linux-based laptop where all this stuff wasn't a total PITA.
Linux boots in 6 seconds. Caps is mapped to Mod4/super, you already have a GIANT control key. Linux does not need NM or Pulse either. And the operating system is not in the middle of being axed by Google, so while updates are not automatic I don't have to worry about them stopping.
But the two biggest points: Linux gets you an extra five hours of battery life, and lets you configure charge limits so that the non-replacable battery won't rot away in three years.