Crossover is a Chrome app that allows Windows programs to run on Chromebooks. My laptop is nearing its own personal End of Life situation (aren't we all?), and I find the price of Chromebooks VERY attractive! But to be honest, I don't want to give up access to Scrivener, Atomic Scribbler, or ACDSee, for that matter Has anyone had any experience with Crossover, and the various Windows writing apps on Chromebook? I'd like to hear about it!
Don't know about crossover, but just a warning about the hardware. Chromebooks are usually cheap because the CPUs are really low end quality, which I wouldn't have in one of my builds. You'll also be very limited when it comes to installing software without a real operating system.
Chromebooks will run Linux natively, and if you get a 4 GM RAM Chromebook it runs well. You can use Scrivener (community-based beta, not up to date with the MacOS version) on Linux. Also, the Chromebooks that are going to be coming out in 2019 are supposedly going to allow dual-boot with Windows, and if that happens you won't need Crossover. Crossover is based on WINE. My experience with WINE is that popular programs with a lot of support can run pretty well. It can also be hit and miss. I also understand that you need a Chromebook with an x86 processor to use Crossover, and that it won't work on machines with ARM processors. You may want to watch for that.
Last time I used WINE on Ubuntu, all 2D graphics was messed up with random black lines and incorrectly aligned images, and that was the few times it would start a Windows application at all. Even thou the Linux system didn't have any GPU accelerated drivers installed, WINE insisted on using the slow and broken emulated drivers to do what the CPU does better than OpenGL to begin with (pixel-exact image drawing). The reference implementations of OpenGL are so full of bugs that some even made it into the official specification, and they had to patch their design document with buggfixes after release. If you want cheap hardware based on ARM, you can install Linux Mate on a Pine64 and use browser applications similar to a chrome book, but without paying for a new screen, and have the ability to install Libre Office natively. The mouse will lagg a bit, but it's okay for writing. Raspbian runs much faster on ARM, but will not be able to run a full web browser nor Windows applications. The noobs distro comes with Libre Office which runs smoothly.
