"ChromeOS/Android hybrids must have confused people"
It's not confusing at all. "It's a laptop and it can run android apps". It doesn't get any simpler. It's harder to explain to people why you can't run android apps on, say, a windows laptop.
Having a Chrome web app for something and an Android app on the same device can get confusing for some users.
Especially if the web app and Android app have different levels of functionality.
Having to log in twice to Pocket was annoying, for example. The Android app couldn't even log in using the browser's session if I recall, since it presents the Firefox oauth in an Android web view
x86 2-in-1 devices are so clearly superior to the Android and ChromeOS sort, that the latter just feel like a bad joke in comparison. I can't wait to be able to run a pure tablet device on mainline Linux and GNOME-Shell; this has become truly feasible only very recently, with GNOME 3.30 and 3.32. (Hopefully the PostmarketOS project will step in and support this on old Android tablets as well, but the huge amount of hardware variety just makes it hard to predict what models will be able to support this without resorting to ugly hacks, like using old vendor kernels and proprietary blobs, etc. etc.)
It seems like most chromebooks today run on x86. I have a pixelbook I picked up on sale for around $650 (mid-grade model marked down from $1200). I've had it for around a year now and it's been a good experience.
I think the big issue for most people and chromeOS is that $400 laptops suck no matter which OS they run. A 12" macbook with the same specs (256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, i5 Y-series processor) runs $1400, has no touchscreen/tablet mode, no pen capability, a bad keyboard, one less USB-C port (a big deal for me), and (surprisingly) a smaller, worse trackpad.
Software has gotten radically better recently. I run chromeOS for my browser, Android for a few apps, and Crostini/Debian 9 for the rest and development. My big complaint is that Crostini isn't GPU accelerated at the moment (they have it working in nightly, so it's coming later this year).
The best part is how seamless it is to run 3 different OS's in one computer at the same time. Android (and Debian) are full installs, so no emulation issues. Instead, chromeOS basically hands off a frame buffer for them to fill (along with relevant IO events they are allowed to see). An Android or Debian apps act just like any other native window on the system while still providing a high level of security.
My big complaint is that some compute-intensive things like running a full test suite takes some time, but that's simply an artifact of the fanless, Y-series form factor (and I still have the option of SSHing into my desktop). I'm not a big fan of the new, unified settings and notifications (I preferred them separate), but it's not a huge issue. I'd like multiple desktops, but those are supposedly already in nightly too.
Overall, I'm not sad to leave my Macbook Pro sitting on the shelf.
> It seems like most chromebooks today run on x86.
Even those that do run on x86 are not really PC-compatible. Sure, sometimes you can open them up and unlock firmware write access, and make them usable in that way. But it's just too much of a hassle when you can just pick up a cheap x86 device that will run so much better.
> ...is that $400 laptops suck no matter which OS they run.
They really don't. Sure, ChromeOS is a bit better than the privacy-invasive, ad-infested dumpster fire that is Windows 10, but there's no comparison with something that's running a proper OS! Just make sure that the hardware components are supported, be wary of devices using bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC as their main storage (this is ubiquitous on Chromebooks, BTW! A lightweight linux distribution can ease the pain, though) and you're set.
I really don't know why people would want to run anything besides Linux or Mac OS X nowadays. Even Android and iOS/iPadOS don't really give you anything UX-wise; recent versions of GNOME 3 have matched it quite nicely. (You really have to appreciate the GNOME designers' foresight here! They bet big on making their UX touch- and mobile-ready, and that bet will bring very clear payoffs now that performances woes are being resolved.)
I have been saying "I can't wait" to mainline tablet support for nearly a decade but that ecosystem is so nonstandard and fast moving that not a single distro can keep up.
