The parent is using Crouton on Acer c720, which has an x86 (Haswell) processor, and is much closer in performance to a modern netbook. The Samsung Chromebook has a fairly dated ARM processor, and the performance on Ubuntu isn't great, but acceptable for my uses (Python and Javascript coding in vim, running a dev server, testing with Chromium). You're not going to have much luck with anything that expects hardware acceleration, but you can switch back to the ChromeOS side with two keystrokes.

I agree with your recommendation though, wait and get the Samsung 2 if you want ARM, or any of the other x86 Chromebooks.

EDIT: And you don't need to type Ctrl-D, it just makes it boot quicker when the bootloader is unlocked