With the exception of a few missing things like full USB pass-through to crostini containers, chromeOS with crostini works about as good as my fedora laptop. I like its window management defaults better then gnome as well. Also you get auto-updated and supported firmware from google and secure boot by default.

Currently running a framework laptop with fedora just because I like the hardware better then most chromebooks and I can very cheaply throw in a fast 2TB ssd rather then spend hundreds extra to upgrade a chromebook to 512GB.

If you have a remote box, probably just remote SSH + web IDE (potentially running on your remote box). For full local, you'd do it through the Crostini layer, which is basically Debian.