Purchasing Chromebook for Ubuntu installation and programming

I'm thinking of buying a new laptop. I want something cheap and light with a good battery life. I've owned Chromebooks in the past, and found they suited my needs then very well. However, since then I've taken up programming, both as a hobby and a career, and I've always found programming in any OS other than Linux to be a prohibitively painful experience.

I've heard encouraging stories about people installing Ubuntu on Chromebooks, and that strategy seems like it would suit my present needs perfectly, but I have some questions: olehana arabic

• Is installing Ubuntu still relatively straightforward on recently-manufactured Chromebooks? Or is this something Google have cracked down on?
• How well does Ubuntu run on a Chromebook? I'll be using it almost exclusively for browsing the web, writing code and running a few relatively low-intensity Python scripts. How might it compare to ChromeOS?
• Can I get a cheaper Linux laptop, of comparable quality to a Chromebook, by looking elsewhere?