Considering flipping my Samsung Chromebook in favor of an Acer C720. If I do decide to go that route, my family gets first crack, you guys get second, and I might try eBay if there's no interest from either corner.
It was refurbed by Best Buy, I've had it for less than two months and have treated it well (don't see any scratches or scuffs), and I paid $182.91 for it including tax. I don't have original packaging as it didn't have any when I got it.
Perfectly serviceable as a Chromebook if that's your thing (in which case I can flash it back to factory, and either leave dev mode enabled or disable it, your choice). Alternately, it runs Xubuntu just fine (and I'd be happy to give you a clean install of that, too, if you'd prefer).
Where I've been having trouble, and the reason I'm considering switching to a Celeron, is that Ubuntu on ARM just isn't as well-supported as I'd hoped. Binary packages for emulators are surprisingly scarce (considering there have got to be dozens of different ARM ports of SNES9X for Android). If you're comfortable typing "./configure && make" you should be able to get NES and Genesis emulation working okay, and DOSbox and ScummVM have binary packages.
But the big problem is I just flat-out have not been able to get hardware acceleration working with the graphics chip, and I've been trying for two months. There are accounts of people getting it to work -- most of them are from last February, and are from
one guy who has since left his job with Canonical and stopped using Ubuntu. (And even the people who HAVE gotten it working say it's buggy and fbdev is better -- but I haven't been able to get Mali fbdev working, either, only the Mesa version, which isn't really any good.)
Now, I haven't tried EVERY possible option yet -- I'm currently going through
ARM's own step-by-step instructions on how to get the Mali drivers to work; failing that, I guess the next thing I can try is rolling back to Ubuntu 12.10 or 12.04 so at least I'm using the same system as all these examples that say they got it to work. Moving in the other direction, 13.10 should hopefully not be too far from an ARM release, and maybe it'll fix these issues -- but maybe it won't.
All this to say, if all you need is a machine that'll browse the Web, ChromeOS is fine for that. If you want a fully-functional Ubuntu distribution, then this is perfectly good for simple day-to-day use. And if you want to play simple, decades-old games, it'll handle that too -- it seems to run the likes of Phantasy Star 4 without a hitch (though I admit that's in a tiny window and I haven't tried fullscreen), and Wizardry 7 sputters a little in the opening video but is perfectly playable, and stuff that's actually running natively like Micropolis and ScummVM should run even better. But if you want SNES or GBA emulation, or DOS games past the early '90's, you're going to have to figure out this graphics acceleration problem that I've been stuck on for the past two months. I'm starting to think I'd be better off with an Acer, which means you probably would be too -- and they retail for the same amount new. But if you don't need graphics acceleration, this is a Samsung Chromebook in Like New condition for about $80 less than you'd pay for a new one.
Oh, and purportedly Flash runs fine in ChromeOS and you can make it run in a Chrome browser under Xubuntu if you copy the libraries over from the ChromeOS partition. I haven't tried. Haven't tried 720p video either -- again, that should work fine in ChromeOS but might sputter a bit in Xubuntu without hardware acceleration. If anyone's interested I can fire some up and let you know how it looks.
If anyone's interested I can figure out shipping; ballpark is probably around $10. I worked in warehouses shipping computers for 3 years of my life so I know my way around bubble wrap and packing tape.
Or if anyone already owns one and has figured out this damn graphics issue, I'd be happy to hear some suggestions in that direction, too.
