Hm, that’s a good point. I think it depends on what you’re doing too though - running Chromium is very clearly slower than the native Chrome because of windowing interactions, running gimp in crostini seems fast but has window-handling glitches sometimes, running command-line or server tasks seems to run at 100% full speed (as it’s just running normally on the native kernel).

You definitely do have to research and get one with good specs, not just one of the $150-for-a-Celeron ones. My whole history with Chromebooks was gradually spending more and more on progressively more powerful ones, and being progressively more happy with the result each time, up until I got a Pixelbook and it was kind of crap. 🥲