Because I don't want to be a sysadmin. I want to take advantage of all the work Google has done to make ChromeOS a slick user experience, including good drivers, seamless and invisible auto-update, fast boot, integration with Google services, etc.
It's false that you have to be a sysadmin to run Linux, and the users here know it perfectly well. There hasn't been a laptop (or desktop for that matter) I owned in the past ~8 years that hasn't worked flawlessly out of the box on the latest Ubuntu/Linux Mint (granted, with the exception of dedicated GPU drivers). And I got everything you mentioned: slick UX, good drivers, auto updates, fast boot on SSD. Granted, no integration with Google services, and I consider that a feature. I also have this little extra:
Owning my computer, as opposed to paying for it to be controlled by Our Benevolent Overlords.
With fedora and gnome, I don't even dnf upgrade anymore. When I turn of the computer, I just check "install updates" which is unchecked by default. This is how updates should work.
Hence "run Debian on it". The whole reason to run a Linux distribution is that the maintainers do most the sysadmin work for you, and Debian maintainers are among the most skilled sysadmins you can find.
You have to keep your filesystems from being full, but apart from that things will Just Work as long as you stay within the Debian tooling.
I don't think this sort of bottom-up approach will make you happy, though. You never know what kind of technology you need tomorrow and whether your Chromebook allows you then to handle that. And fixing that then is not possible, not with a bit of sysadmin work.
Don’t know why you are being downvoted- this is the exact reason I bought a Mac, can totally sympathize. I hear the dell and thinkpad have this problem solved from the driver point of view at least though.
