LenovoIdeaPad Flex 5i Chromebook Plus 14" FHD+ 2-in-1 Touchscreen Laptop (Intel Core i3-1315U, 8GB RAM, 256GB Storage), Home, Students, Backlit, FHD Webcam, Chrome OS, 2TB of Cloud Storage, Grey

Within our household, three children are gamers alongside two adult gamers. It's getting a little expensive now tbh lol. Over Thanksgiving break we all landed on Stardew Valley as a video game we enjoy playing together as a family, but our youngest sons' 12 yr old entry-level gaming laptop is dying, even with upgrading ram and a reset on that machine it can't handle most games anymore. So he wasn't able to play with us on his own rig. We took turns, but it just wasn't as fun.Enter the Lenovo Flex 5i. I took the time to enable the Linux Beta, went through the process of getting steam set to 32-bit, and downloaded Stardew Valley. It runs smoothly, with no glitching/lag. I did make the Linux portion of the HD take more of a share than was suggested, 30 Gb vs 10 Gb to accommodate adding more demanding games. It runs Terraria and other similar titles beautifully. But this Chromebook doesn't stop there for us, we've been using it for web surfing, streaming movies, and as an extra device for homework when the school Chromebooks are slow/acting up. It's filling a niche that we truly didn't realize we needed in our home.Overall: If you are looking to play some low-demand (side scrollers, dungeon crawling 32-bit games) steam games via Linux, then this is a great option. If you just need something to watch movies/youtube/surf the web it's more than powerful enough to handle that with ease. This Chromebook is sleek, peppy, and feels expensive even though we got it for under $300. My only minor complaint so far is the matte finish is prone to showing every fingerprint on the outside of the case, but at the same time, it lets us see how often it is being used and reminds us to clean it often.But as a final note, for us, this Chromebook is a stop-gap/multi-purpose item to fill in when we need it. In late winter/early spring, our son will probably get a mini gaming PC since he isn't as big of a gamer as the rest of his siblings but may want to play more robust games. This Chromebook gives us some breathing room over the winter to research & shop for his future rig while allowing us all to play games together as a family.

You don't expect much from a $300 chromebook in terms of quality, but this things is very impressive. The all metal build feels very sturdy, as do the hinges. The keyboard is higher quality than most $1000 laptops, and the screen and speakers are much higher quality than I would expect from this price range (you can hear actual bass and get pretty good contrast of dark colors!). The battery lasts for like 8 straight hours of streaming, and the fan noise is usually quiet enough that it isn't noticeable.The only real problems I've had with it is that it for some reason disagrees with some streaming services, notably Hulu and HBOMax. It behaves weirdly on those sites and playback will fail every few days, forcing a restart. This hasn't happened on any of my other devices, but the same behavior happened on two of these laptops (I got a replacement to check). Don't know what's going on there, but otherwise it's great.

I've only had this for a day but it's a great little Chromebook for getting lite work done. I've yet to try the touchscreen out as I've been using it strictly as a laptop. The battery life is mediocre, depending on what you do. For Google doc editing and article reading with Spotify in the background I was getting about 7 hours. Not bad for a laptop but not great for a Chromebook. It's a bit heavier than other Chromebooks I've tried but still perfectly manageable. The little i3 is pulling its weight in this Chromebook. Everything feels very responsive and I've yet to have any hangups, even when trying it out with multiple 1080p YouTube videos going and several chrome tabs for research. I'm thoroughly impressed.Overall I would still personally give it 5 stars.Note: I did order this through Amazon. UPS was very slow to get it from Amazon to my town. They then delivered it to an unknown address and neither UPS or Amazon were helpful at all and the package was never recovered. Amazon did, however, issue a refund and I picked one up locally, albeit at a slightly higher price. Better than dealing with UPS, though.