Yeah, my chromebook is x86. It’s using an apollolake pentium. The older your chromebook, the better the support. Braswell chromebooks are basically perfect in terms of mainline support, for example. It usually takes years to get chromebooks to a usable state on an unmodified install because Google doesn’t want to contribute anything and there aren’t many people working on them.

If you want a relatively cheap Linux laptop, I’d look at the Pinebook Pro, which is designed to run Linux, so it will be a much better experience.