[christoofar]

honestly, with Netflix working now under Ubuntu (and others), and the ability to access it via the NetfliXBMC add-on, the (media center related) reasons for dual booting ChromeOS are pretty minimal IMO

Since I'm not very well versed in Linux (played with some distros a few years back on an old PC laying around, but not much else), I'm a bit leery of going that route.OE pretty much just works "out of the box", with ubuntu, seems there is some general knowledge & tweaking required (audio & other stuff?)

Granted I'm one data point, but Ubuntu is actually pretty solid these days. Last time I did Ubuntu + xbmc was 4 years ago, was much more annoying then. But now HDMI outputs, video and sound, have worked perfectly for me with zero setup on two machines, with and without XBMC. The sole Ubuntu related issue I had was this CPU idling issue, which was trivial to fix with Matt's help (also probably my fault for downloading the LTS Ubuntu instead of the most up to date one). Performance wise it's also quite good, keep in mind that you can (and should) log directly into XBMC. This means that in general Unity is not running at all. Although, even logged into Unity I was only using about 500 MB of memory I believe, and it was quite smooth. So if you ever have a a one-off need that can't easily be addressed in XBMC, you have the advantage that you can just log into Unity and do just about anything.

For me, the biggest plus with Ubuntu is that (from my limited knowledge) it's superior if you also want to setup your htpc as a server. If you want to be able to control torrent downloading, or access your files over ssh, non-locally, Ubuntu has the edge. If you have separate htpc and server machines then this is irrelevant.

I'll be exploring this option at some point. For now, I'm able to use a workaround (my trusty Logitech N5901) which is recognized at bootup, thankfully.