I run Ubuntu Trusty with kernal 3.19 on HP Chromebook 14 4GBRAM on which I upgraded the SSD to 64GB as my personal dev machine.I mostly work with Go, JS which work very well & Android Studio - the last is a bit slow but bearable - battery life is excellent. The most important enablers were buying a Haswell processor based model with support for Legacy boot and upgrading the ssd without which it's not really feasible to use it as a dev machine.
http://chromebook-falco.blogspot.in/?m=1
Look up the ChrUbubuntu script for pointers on partitioning but it's not really needed as newer Linux kernals have most of the patches it applies. http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.in/2013/10/chrubuntu-for-new-c...