Tesno

It’s not usually the controller that’s unreliable. It’s the computer and combination (because people can’t use computers) of different hardware. Also wires and others may break easily when treated badly. In my opinion every setup needs some running in. You need to play a lot and try different stuff so you truly understand how does your controller and computer act. I’ve played with atm 100€ Hercules for 4 years and so far it’s has been more reliable than the setups I’ve used with ipod as a music library.
I’ve had one controller model (EKS XP5) that really crashes when you put on the lights or make other minimal changes to system. That’s really exceptional and bad. =D There will always be some buzz sounds when you for example connect pc power adapter but that happens with cd players and others too every now and then.
Wedding isn’t really the worst place to test your equipment, but there can always some unexpected. The thing being a professional is that you can handle and solve the problems before and in the moment.

Couple of points:
1. Pioneer is also using tablets and phones for preparing tracks so it’s kinda no-computer idealogy even at preparation-level.
2. There has been usb stick players for ages. If you don’t want/need the things computing and analyzing brings, you have plenty of old and new hardware even before controllers came.
3. XDJ-Aero is already quite cheap (499€): http://www.pioneer.eu/fi/products/44/1992/34209/XDJ-AERO/page.html
support may stop anytime soon, if not already stopped. I didn’t like the limited options that hardware and recordbox gave.
4. Standalone seems to be only quite rock solid option, if you want stability. Sad but true.

AMD processors are not that low quality, but usually lack processing power when compared to Intel. I think you should be ok with some AMD A8 for example, but haven’t tried it. Also Serato doesn’t support AMD at all so you can’t use just any software.

Bigger problem are low powered processor that both Intel and AMD are selling in supermarkets. Atom based stuff is too weak, same goes with AMD E-series, possibly even laptop versions of A-series at some extent. If you use light software (not Traktor or Serato, DJuced at least), I think you can manage even with low powered processor. I got Haswell based celeron and it’s more than enough powerful for playing with 2 Gb ram. In Windows I think you should have at least 4 Gb.

Some Chromebooks are also ARM based and while it isn’t that much of support problem in linux, ARM still lacks the horse power for desktop use. With tablets the software and OS is wee bit lighter and they can work.

As they say in DDJTips, you have to choose program first. There’s one free called Mixxx (I’m not aware of other proper possibilities with Chromebooks), that works in Linux. Chromebook kernel doesn’t support midi, so you can’t use any controllers with this/Chrubuntu. You need to run other operating system and kernel somehow.

I played my first set with Chromebook hardware yesterday and yes, it is possible, but you basically have to use other operating system. I booted distro called DidJix from usb drive. Worked about correctly, touchpad just needs drivers/you can use mouse.

http://didjix.blogspot.fi/

You can try the distro with any X86 computer and decide after that if you want to start playing with Chromebook/this.

You would get more answers, if you’d make a little summary what you really want. To the question (If I understood correctly), you could use EKS XP5 for example. It’s cheap. Not the best controller out there, but it works with mixer.