Can I use a chromebook as a ssh workstation?

The chrome book can support your use case natively, but it is a bit limited. There are some apps you can install that give more full features.

Inside the browser you can install a ssh client or use a limited, built-in shell by doing CTRL+ALT+T to open up a CROmium SHell (CROSH for short) . The terminal can only ssh into other machines and a few other things, a lot of the things that you expect from your standard bash are definitely missing.

That said, the chrome book is great for web browsing and just ssh-ing to other computers

Some Crosh commands

Check out "Secure Shell" A great SSH client for chromebooks. Supports saved sessions, private keys Made by google's chromium team, but is in beta. Works great for me though

There are plenty of other options you can go with as well, but I like Secure Shell. Also, anytime you need new programs for a chromebook the place to go is the Chrome web store

By default you have an ssh-command in the very limited CTRL-ALT-T-shell.

Preferably you want to use a chrome-extension like this one and make it open in a seperate window, so browser-shortcuts (like <CTRL-W> or <CTRL-N> are not in the way).

Another very interesting possibility - and this makes your Chromebook among the best Linux laptops - is enabling developer mode and using Crouton so you can run an XFCE-desktop in parallel with ChromeOS (switchting between the two running instances is as easy as CTRL-ALT-F1/F2. Once you enabled developer mode, there is also a real Linux-shell available (even without Crouton).