I run Ubuntu on my Chromebook. It's what I'm using to read this now. Web browsing works just fine. There's a limit to how many sites I can have open at a time, but since I regularly view sites that use over 1 GB of ram in Chromium, that's the case on all my machines.
Most of the games I play run in 4 GB, but since my Chromebook only has 32 GB of storage, There are some I can't install and I generally only have four or five installed at any given time.