There are few things quite as emblematic of late stage capitalism than the concept of “planned obsolescence”.
My 15 years old Linux laptop can still do everything (except gaming new titles)
I have preordered a framework laptop which will run Linux until it fucking blows up or falls apart.
Enough with being screwed over by well known brands whose interest is just selling you more and more stuff.
Chromebooks expire? What the fuck? Are there logistical problems with installing Linux on these devices?
the Chromebooks with ARM processor (the majority of the cheaper ones) are notoriously known to be awful to install any alternative operating system
I think its more that Google supports them for only so long and then they go bitrotten. The final update for these devices should also unlock the firmware so people can wipe the device and install Linux or something on it.
Chromebooks are unfortunately meant to be disposable like phones. Nobody should buy one, but unfortunately schools get them because they’re cheap.
On an individual basis you can install Linux, but for millions of devices thrown out by schools around the world, there’s no solution because the residual value is so tiny, you’d have to pay the techs minimum wage and hold a gun to their heads to get enough devices per hour to justify it.
I used to work at a refurb place and when we saw a chromebook that wasn’t immediately OK (it could’ve had a bad display or keyboard, or locked to an account), we just removed the eMMC, smashed the chip and threw the device on our scrap pallet.
Give them to the kids with a QR code guide sticker about installing Linux on them? I’m not a kid, but I would love if someone “threw” a couple of these in my general direction.
Almost certainly not allowed, schools are responsible for privacy and security on these devices.
Any standard desktop linux is more private and secure than google spyware
And as soon as the IT guy at school installs Linux on these machines, he’s responsible for said privacy and security. And he’s a lot easier to sue than Google if something goes wrong.
This is exactly why right here, cost aside.
I would not hand out hundreds of Chromebooks to kids running some Linux distro I installed even if I could.
Most of these Chromebooks are 3-4 years old and in really rough shape. Kids use these things for literally everything. You likely wouldn’t even want them for free. Probably bio-waste at this point.
A friend asked me to fix their daughter’s desktop and also asked if she could borrow an old laptop to use in the meantime. The desktop was disgusting with food smeared all over the keys and display. I cleaned it up and fixed it and sent it back. My laptop was returned with food smeared everywhere after just a few days. I was stunned.
Phones shouldn’t be disposable either, I’m coming up on five years on mine.
They shouldn’t be, but they’re designed to be, especially Androids with their abysmal software support period.
Is there something preventing the use of ansible or similar, to handle the installs?
Ansible probably doesn’t change UEFI settings or switch off the hardware lock that some Chromebooks have for installing a new OS.
You have to remember that these things cost like 200 USD new and they’re utterly underpowered. By the time they stop getting updates, they have so little residual value, it’s literally not worth salvaging them.
still using things like Google Chrome or Chromebooks in 2023 is actually reckless behaviour. stuff like manifest v3 and the web integrity api just prove that google will use their monopoly to take over the open internet
Yes, why have we as a society allowed Google of all companies to take over something as important as public education? It’s downright dystopian.
Companies making mass market devices should be required by law to support them indefinitely, or until they publish the technical specs sufficient for community support and repair.
The upgrade cycle they’re allowed to get away with today is not only a ridiculous drain on people’s money, but also a shameful source of pollution and waste.
until they publish the technical specs sufficient for community support and repair.
I want to see phones with no further official OS support have their boot loaders opened up so a lightweight OS can be installed on them instead. I’ve had iPhones in the past that have been absolutely rock solid after a battery replacement that lost iOS support, and with that a whole bunch of resale value. So I now tend to sell mine a year or so before they’re likely to be dropped.
But I genuinely think that I’d hold on to an iPhone that could have an alternative OS installed. This is, of course, why none of the major manufacturers allow this. Gotta put the profits ahead of the ethics.
Exactly, bootloader locking should be downright illegal. If EU wants to make phones last, they need to mandate that you can unlock the bootloader (WITHOUT bullshit like having to get an unlock code from the manufacturer). Want to lock it down for certain software features like payments, etc? Ok, fine, I can live with that, so long as I can unlock it if I so choose and keep all HARDWARE functionality intact.
On another note, the manufacturers should be upstreaming and mainlining their drivers in the Linux kernel. ChromeOS and Android are both built on Linux, yet they keep all their hardware support in forks and branches that are left to wither and die rather than submitting those changes upstream. Only a select few ARM SoCs have mainline support. If the companies would just put a bit of extra effort into doing things right rather than the shitty hack jobs they do now to get products out the door as fast as possible, we could have a much better ecosystem around old phones. Of course, the shittiness is by design.
Actually in the Android community Sony helps you unlock your bootloader and offers official AOSP sources for their devices that you can compile and install yourself.
I have no idea why people are enamored with Samsung.
Ad campaigns, most likely. I always seem to see ads for Samsung phones, but not as often for Sony brand ones. I do agree Sony does a much better job about opening up the bootloader, versus Samsung punishing you for trying to open your own paid for device up.
That’s what they should be doing, but it isn’t what they’re going to do, unfortunately.
Kimathi Bradford, a 16-year-old Oakland tech repair intern, has looked into whether there was a way to replace the outdated Chromebook software with a non-Google brand, but it ended up being a lot of work, Kimathi said, and the open-source replacement wasn’t up to par. “It’s like the Fritos of software,” he said. “No one really wants to use it.”
Now, I’m not sure if what they tried was Linux, but I wouldn’t be too surprised. The younger generations grew up with smartphones; I feel as though operating systems will become more streamlined and opaque as time goes on. I suspect we’ll have to contend with the phonification of mainstream computing in the coming years.
As a lover of Frito pie, I take offense to this
I take offense to the idea that there is something called Frito pie, and worse, that your comment leads us to believe, hopefully errantly, that somebody has concocted such an abomination.
Why would you subject yourself to eating something that’s famous for smelling like the bacteria that festers between dogs’ toes: https://be.chewy.com/is-this-normal-why-do-my-dogs-feet-smell-like-fritos/
I’ve heard of CS majors coming in these days not knowing what a filesystem is.
A decade or more of kids growing up with shitty toy computers instead of real computers will do that. Mobile OSes, in their ridiculous pursuit to dumb down the computing experience, have dumbed down the computer users.
There seems to be a sweet spot in age where you grew up with actual computer experience. Young enough to actually grow up with computers in your household and school but old enough for those computers to not be toy mobile crap.
I’m very glad mobile Linux phones exist now. Having a real computer in my pocket rather than some awful imitation of what a computer should be is refreshing. I always wanted a pocket computer as a kid, but then when it actually happened it felt nothing like a computer unless you hacked it.
It’s not a sensible path for a school with budget constraints (which is most schools). They would need to come up with a new MDM solution because they can’t manage their computers with Google anymore. So their IT costs would increase dramatically, probably more money than they would save by keeping the old hardware alive. The simplest path forward is to just buy new Chromebooks.
I haven’t (will never) had the experience of owning chromebook as a student, what does the MDM will do here? Cheating prevention?
Mobile Device Management, aka the administering of software to a fleet of devices.
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I wonder what it would look like without these measures?
Back in My Day™, we had minimal MDM on the school computers.
Yes, the kids that wanted to fuck around (look at porn, download music, play games) fucked around, but they would have the old-fashioned way, anyway. The most common thing was just changing the desktop photo to a Lamborghini, or something. Anyway, we turned out…. Well… not necessarily ok, but I don’t fault the computers for lack thereof where applicable.
Admittedly, these weren’t personal laptops but just ones in the library or computer labs, but still.
Sorry but Fritos of software is dumb & in no way representative of bringing old chromebooks back to life beyond their support date.
Schools often buy the bottom baseline of everything & in now way was a 4gb of ram a good, decent or proper experience to begin w/ & their replacements probably also had 4gb of ram - just a faster cpu, gpu & ram to hide that it’s lacking ram still.
I think schools could easily band together & make their own education focused Linux distro & then just focus on hardware that’s compatible w/ that’s Chromebooks or Windows laptops. Hard part would be building out an on par MDM &/or ldap server if not using a Windows server.
All Chromebook are is a browser basically. It already is the bag of Fritos imho. I think the hard part though would be to hire an IT guy that knows Linux better than the students tbh. Schools already under pay teachers in the US & that goes 2-3x for IT staff.
I mean, underpaid IT aside, do they need to be better than the students?
We like to organize school like there’s rules, you follow them, and if you do better it must be because you are better.
But thats not how the world works, and it’s not how technology works - it’s all about understanding the system and looking for loopholes
Is it better to enforce absolute control though? It teaches you nothing but how to be a good cog in the machine.
Teaching you that the rules aren’t absolute, but requires skill and legwork gives you a mindset to actually succeed in our warped little resource allocation game. Instead you should teach them to consider the effects - if they crash the network, make school suck for everyone for a few days.
But as to your original point, you still need an admin who can at least manage the network, and they should be given the funds to pay for that
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Right, but then multiply that guide x1000 systems, losing google enterprise, switching over to a unix directory system, setting up infrastructure, network shares, printers, and everything and it’s not just a guide - it’s a team of people working for weeks to get it set up. Of course to us it’s easy, it’d just be a computer or two. To an entire company/school it may be over a million dollars to swap over
You’re saying it’s over a million dollars to revive some chromebooks? Or to build out a system that is independent from planned obsolescence? For a school district that has to operate in the long term, I think one of those is a bargain.
Also, the cost of maintaining 2 vs 1000 systems obviously scales up, but it’s obviously not nearly linear. The difference in cost between managing 1000 and 2000 systems would be negligible.
Right, for a huge enterprise they would probably honestly consider it, but a school with ~1000 students? Less? It’s going to be cheaper to trash those and get new ones. Don’t get me wrong I think it’s a terrible waste and Google is horrible for putting them in this situation, and I’d love for the open source community to offer some scripts for wiping, installing ubuntu, setting up ACLs, connecting to a domain, connecting shares, etc, but still most schools are going to see this and just say “Okay google how much money do you need for us to keep working?”
The plan on a large scale with a team sounds good, but IT at schools is a total mixed bag due to budget, etc. I’ve seen some schools where IT is just burnt out and underpaid (can’t tell which came first) and sometimes the IT team will be an old head that still reminisces about Windows NT.
It would be cool if there was an independent team that resurrected those laptops for schools. I think the problem that arises though is security.
Agree. I’ve got a chromebook running Linux, for that I had to open it up and remove a screw. It takes around 15 minutes if you’ve done it before, so for bulk migration to Linux it’s not feasible.
You had to remove a screw to install Linux? Is that like a physical tampering prevention measure? Makes me think of how I had to swap a jumper to install a GPU in an old HP tower that had integrated video.
Yes it’s exactly that, check out this documentation.
What kind of monster doesn’t like Fritos?
I love this, the idea that the hardware is done once the software gives out is asinine. It’s also what companies have been selling us on for decades now. It’s long past time to rethink the idea of what hardware lifespan really looks like
Yes!! Chromebooks have so much potential.
I have a cheapo 2016 acer Chromebook still going strong with Gallium OS. (An ubuntu based distro geared at low spec chromebooks.)
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I, on the other hand, have a Lenovo Duet 2 which sort of sucked the day I bought it and has hardly gotten any better. I wanted a new Android tablet for taking notes and reading comics and there was just nothing else decent available a year ago. Specifically got an ARM one so it would reliably run Android apps. Which it doesn’t – it’s so unstable. Have to reboot it regularly when stuff stops working. The promise of Android apps on ChromeOS was more of a hope than a pledge.
Good thing it was cheap because this thing has practically no future for me. I regret everything about it.
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same article mentions Chromebooks are a great alternative to Raspberry Pis – cheaper and come with a built in keyboard and screen for monitoring all your automation needs …
Planned Obsolesce should be a crime
I would have agreed with that statement until I saw the most recent Technology Connections video about why the incandescent light bulb has planned obsolescence built in. Sometimes it’s not malicious but to actually provide a compromise leading to an overall better product.
I don’t think software death dates count, tho.
That wasn’t planned obsolescence though, it was an industry-created standard for the tradeoff between efficiency, brightness, and lifespan. Planned obsolescence is specifically when a product is made to break sooner than it needs to.
Software Death Dates strike me as more “Malware” than “Compromise”
TLDR: I’m still very suspicious of how that is quantified - “leading to an overall better product”.
Who quantifies that and how, on a case by case basis, especially in the form of Chromebooks or phones for revenant, popular examples?
Let’s say it was a laptop: I can see issues with lithium batteries perhaps reaching a cycle count that lead them to be dangerous. Wouldn’t that mean though you should produce a good that has replaceable batteries? Is the battery designed in such a manner on purpose?
Businesses with shareholders that live quarter to quarterly profit are the issue. There is no authoritarian legislator that reallocates resources like China did the last few years, for example, whether you like it or not.
The US relies on legislation to be passed to mandate the changes or prohibit a device from being built a certain way. That legislation can be lobbied for loopholes, have various people in power also own percentages of the companies, etc. Whether you agree with it or not, there are many checks and balances and simultaneously a lack thereof.
Light bulbs aren’t planned obsolescence though, he even said as much in the video, light bulbs more akin to dish-soap which eventually runs out then a device made to be obsolete faster. They are consumable items, which run out or burn out, they are not expensive appliances with long lives, hell he even pointed out that some utilities gave them away for free.
but to actually provide a compromise leading to an overall better product.
Could you elaborate a bit more on that?
For incandescent lightbulbs, his point was that bulbs can burn fast and bright or low and slow, and standardizing on a lifespan of 1000 hours was a sweet spot between performance and longevity. For example, it makes 60W bulbs from different manufacturers more interchangeable and less prone to tricky marketing gimmicks like a “long life” 60W bulb that’s dimmer.
Thank you for explaining this concept. I still don’t see how it can be considered planned obsolescence, though. It looks more like a matter of optimizing the output and doing a tradeoff for more performance.
I see planned obsolescence as artificially limiting the longevity or repairability of a product, without any benefit at all, but with the intention of making it less durable. A good example could be locked smartphones without updates.
But perhaps, the definition of planned obsolescence is broader than i think.
When I was in 9th grade it was netbooks with Windows 7 and they were also terrible and fated for the recycling bin before I was a junior.
In most enterprise IT your lifespan for hardware is between 5 and 7 years maybe 10 for printers and network switches.
I’m sure most schools try to stretch hardware as far as it will go but IT would have known when they bought the Chromebooks that they’d not be long for this world as cheap as they were and that’s the price they would pay for paying such a low price.
I think what is sticking up the works is on an administrative level, higher ups are expecting IT departments to stretch EOL dates like they used to do with Windows machines but now they absolutely can’t and Admin didn’t plan to have to buy all new whether or not IT did
The service life of the devices was known up-front. You can check for yourself the service life dates of every Chrome OS machine here:
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en
The correct deployment strategy would be to make a big purchase at the front end of a device’s lifecycle and then only replacements from then on out so that you get the most out of every machine. Future capital purchases would be with a new device and termination date.
I think this point is really important, and allow me to go one step further: I work in the public sector of education and purchasing technology is such a complex issue that IT governance has to be involved with decisions like this. That’s to say that, without a governing body to review purchases (outside of whoever handles the actual procurement, i.e. funds leaving the bank account), mistakes like this will happen.
We can be upset with planned obsolescence, but there’s distinctly a human error here where there wasn’t enough research and planning.
Anyone know where I can buy or place bids on batches/pallets/etc of them? I want to self host a bunch of shit using those cheap computers that are being thrown out.
Same here!
Sourcing Chromebooks from the Reviving Chromebooks with Ubuntu I posted elsewhere
easiest looks like just calling the IT department of your local school
Interesting article, I don’t think I have a use for them though.
“These updates depend on many device-specific non-Google hardware and software providers that work with Google to provide the highest level of security and stability support,” said Peter Du, communications manager for ChromeOS. “For this reason, older Chrome devices cannot receive updates indefinitely to enable new OS and browser features.”
Bull. Shit.
I have an 8 year old iPad that can still use Amazon video and can still run Netflix, and google drops support for these computers as early as 3 years. I’m not an Apple fanboy but that is absolutely ridiculous.
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What year is the mini from? I run a Plex server off a 2010 Mac mini.
Apple devices are serviceable for far longer after the OS stops updating than windows/android devices in my experience. But regardless, Apple doesn’t discontinue support as early as 3 or 4 years. Even you have to admit that is ridiculous of google.
has to be dumped
OpenCore Legacy Patcher, Linux, ChromeOS Flex, and maybe even Windows 10 could all be options for that Mac. As-is ot would still be perfectly safe to use offline too.
You’re also not a giant customer who needs security and it services like a school district. 3 years might be early, idk, but in plenty of enterprise or institutes replace their hardware every so often.
My 2012 laptop runs windows 10 perfectly fine and has the latest security updates. We’re way past the point of using hardware limitations as an excuse for companies to drop support early.
I don’t see why a school should have to replace their basic computers with an equally basic computer after 3 years unless it’s broken beyond repair. I don’t think the OS itself is doing much more than what an enterprise copy of windows does for security.
Funny you should say this. I have a 2012 Retina Macbook Pro, and yes it is running Windows or Linux with all the latest updates. However, Apple stopped supporting it in 2020. It’s too old for MacOS updates.
I’ve even seen a guide that will allow me to hack past the normal BIOS restrictions/allow me to put Windows 11 on it.
The only reason Windows 11 can’t run on super old hardware is because of the misleading decision to require secure boot (a feature of the motherboard that stops unsigned OSes from booting). The metaphor I use is that it is like a car radio manufacturer refusing to let a car radio work in cars that don’t have car alarms then calling the radio secure because of it.
Yeah, Windows 11 is a bad example of supporting old hardware because Microsoft stupidly and maliciously requires secure boot and TPM2 just to lock out otherwise fine hardware from using Windows 11. You can run Win11 without secure boot or TPM2 with mods, the hardware is perfectly capable.
Or just put Linux on it. Linux runs on damn near everything because it’s designed to run on damn near everything. There’s no profit motive to only support Linux on the newest and shiniest devices like there is for Apple, Google, Samsung, and even Microsoft (who sells most copies of Windows preinstalled on new PCs).
How do I go about running Win 11 without secure boot? I have a BIOS motherboard from 2009. Windows 10 is EOL relatively soon. I plan on getting a new computer and using some genre of Linux but I’m curious what to do about the current one.
The secure boot requirement can actually be circumvented pretty easily
Give me the deets please 👍
Huh? I have an ipad mini and since two-three years ago it’s as useful as a brick, Apple doesn’t allow me to install any app because they require a newer os version (that’s not available for the model)
By contrast my much older nexus 7 can still use most apps that I want
It can’t run everything obviously but the fact that my nearly 10 year old iPad can handle video streaming still and these schools have bricked laptops after 3 years is ridiculous.
Those Chromebooks aren’t bricked. They simply don’t get chrome updates anymore, even if it’s just Linux+Chrome and updates could continue forever without any real effort from Google
For security issues they can’t give to students unsupported hardware. The discontinued iPad would go in the same e-waste bin, because it’s not like android where browsers will continue to get updates for years and years
For a school they functionally are. They can’t use them if they can’t get security updates.
and instead the ipad that doesn’t get security updates since 2018 in your example doesn’t count?
Well for starters it wasn’t purchased by or for schools so no. But even if it was, it gets far more than 3 years of support. I think 5 is somewhat reasonable if we’re just going to accept this sort of behavior.
Either way the comparison is not really apt. Mobile devices are far worse about this than PC’s. You should instead compare a macbook (or a cheap windows machine), which gets security updates for 7-10 years. Google knows their devices are very popular for school computers, so to treat them like mobile devices and enforce the terrible standards that comes with is pernicious.
I will give credit to Apple on that one because android phone manufacturers are now supporting their phone for longer because of how long Apple is supporting them.
I remember back in the day when I had apple devices where they would push updates for devices long past their capability to actually run the updated software. Rather than refuse the update or get a pruned patch with security fixes only, it would force updates and bloat your phone and grind it into unresponsive unusability after a few years.
I hear that’s not so much the case anymore, so that’s nice. But I remember. The main reason I upgraded my phone was because of that, the hardware was great, but I could hardly use the software anymore even after clean installs.
My point being, I guess, extended support is great if managed properly but it can also become a bludgeon with which to drive you toward the new generations of devices.
long past their capability to actually run the updated software
Well, Apple intentionally slowed those devices down to make the users update, instead of using an insecure device, that would’ve provided a good experience otherwise.
And these days Apple is retiring devices arbitrarily for profits too. For example this year they are retiring the Iphone 8, which has better hardware, than the ipad 2018 that is still being supported…
That slowness was, at least officially, for the battery health. Do you have the support to prove otherwise?
And then if I recall correctly (though I can’t be bothered to look) didn’t they get sued for slowing phones?
So people were mad that their phones battery wasn’t holding a charge anymore, “im being forced to upgrade”, so Apple throttled older phones to keep the battery running, aka allowing people to keep their phones longer, and then they got sued for slowing down phones lol.
I am an apple fan boy, I wont hide that. But it does seem like they tried to do a “good” and make peoples phones last longer, and then got sued.
Also the whole forced upgrade just isn’t apples game IMO. Do they want you buying the new one every year, of course. But the more important thing is that you keep using AN iPhone at all. Stay in the ecosystem, stay in the app store, stay paying for icloud, etc.
Going to a new phone gives the user a window to move away from IOS. (Though most won’t haha)
These conversations bring the weirdest people out of the woodwork. I remember talking with a guy who explained to me how crap Apple laptops were because you (according to him) can’t customise them. Turns out he’d never owned or even used an Apple laptop. I was like, why do you care?! Especially about something you have no experience with!
The problem is that those people often can’t read. Everyone has a biased opinion or two they forgot to back up with support, but those people can’t be argued with. I want to know how to talk with them.
Actually yes. I bought a brand new -discounted old stock- Iphone 4s for my mum near the end of the ios 8 cycle. The day before we installed ios 9 on it, it had okay performance and good battery life. Following the update to ios9 the performance went to complete shit. (the battery remained usable for 2 more years after, but it was not a good experience for her)
How does that prove that it was not for your battery health?
I think the more probable reason is that EU regulators were unhappy with this for a long time and have now put 3 years of OS updates and 5 years of security updates into law. Low cost Android manufacturers don’t care what Apple does.
Back for their laptops the support has dropped to the lowest in years. Some intel MacBooks no longer get the latest version after 6 years.
Confused noise from people who grew up using Windows 95.
I have a 15 year old laptop that can still browse the web and play YouTube videos just fine because PC is a standardized platform with an open standard bootloader and a BIOS/UEFI system designed to abstract the hardware so the OS doesn’t have to be tailor-made to the hardware. Mobile devices are absolute shit in this regard. Why does the OS have to be specifically built to target one particular device?
It shouldn’t. End of question. This applies to Android, ChromeOS, and Apple devices equally.
I’m glad mobile Linux is starting to take off and there seem to be some standards emerging around ARM booting, even if it is still an absolute shit show compared to the standardization of UEFI/BIOS on x86/x86-64. I know some ARM systems can UEFI boot but it’s few and far between still so most devices still need a tailored kernel at least. That said, ARM Linux doesn’t need the entire freaking stack tailored to a device like Android and iOS do.
Couldn’t agree more. Every computer I have, no matter how old, can connect and do most things fine.
Apple does the same thing if you don’t already have those installed
My 2nd gen Apple TV is garbage. Nearly all the apps fail to load now. 🤷♂️… I suppose I can try jailbreaking it but it sure feels like someone is trying to force me to upgrade my hardware.
That’s a product that hasn’t had an Apple update since 2014. What realistically do you expect hardware manufacturers to do with actually old hardware? Lose money supporting it forever? This is kind of the opposite case from the chromebooks.
Weeell “bullshit” is easy to claim but not necessarily untrue. So with android phones this is definitely a problem. Industry wide firmware support for these ARM SOC-s are often ranging from not long enough, to fucking atrocious. You get basically two years of new drivers, and a security update maybe. The way LinageOS manages to support phones like the note 3, from like android 4, to 11, is basically creating manifests, that use drivers from newer, still supported, but “similar-ish” components. And the note 3 was a flagship device, easily the fastest phone of it’s generation. These Chromebooks, especially the ones schools can and do afford, are built to the penny. There is ultimately no point in pushing a software update to a device for a significant cost, that makes it so slow that no reasonable person would ever consider using it.
What is the solution to this? Hard to say. Not buying hardware so incredibly obsolete that it has to run an alternate OS, is a start. Maybe just use PC-s and deploy linux.
The solution is to let people use the device in any way they want and can. Software should not dictate hardware obsolescence.
If I’m reading this correctly (and you need to read between the lines a bit), it’s not that they literally don’t work, it’s that they aren’t capable of getting security updates. For playing Minecraft, who cares, but schools are legally obligated to keep private student information (like all their schoolwork) secure.
It’s not like there’s a LineageOS for Chromebooks and standardized firmware and drivers that can be easily deployed and updated. They mentioned in the article that open source alternatives were trialed, but that they lacked needed features and were very costly (in time, presumably) to get working.
This is just a shit sandwich all around.
From another perspective, several schools I’ve worked at have had so much vandalism and theft of Chromebooks that they won’t even consider replacing them with more costly future-proof tech. It doesn’t matter if they gets 8 years of software support if students break most of them in years 1-3.
This is exactly the issue for me. Devices used by 10-18 yo students do not last 10 years, and so it doesn’t matter if they get software support for that long.
My 12 y/o has gone through 3 Chromebooks since the pandemic, but they are $50 refurbished so who cares
Edit I have a gaming rig, and he uses the GeForce cloud gaming service on his Chromebook, and he loads into Fortnite faster than I do when we play duos
It’s not like there’s a LineageOS for Chromebooks and standardized firmware and drivers that can be easily deployed and updated. They mentioned in the article that open source alternatives were trialed, but that they lacked needed features and were very costly (in time, presumably) to get working.
You can run Linux on them, it’s the cost of getting a bunch of shitty ass chromebooks done that’s not worth it for schools.
But they kinda sorta do. It is not like Chromebooks are locked down like an iPhone. I had an old Samsung Chromebook, you could just turn off trusted boot with a flick of a switch (okay it did reset your device), and just run what you wanted. It’s just with arm based stuff running what you want is not trivial. You run what you can which is often nothing.
FYI Most Chromebooks are Intel CPU computers, there are a few arm based ones but majority are Intel x86_64.
Aren’t most Chromebooks out there Intel CPUs and essentially PC hardware? I know there are a few arm ones but it’s not most of them.
Fuck these Corporations, the only reason for this is to get the public school systems to constantly buy new chromebooks.
Awful!!! I remember using those junktops when I was in high school…
Made me realize I still have one lying around and I tried to put Linux on it, but they seem to only let you sandbox Linux in it…? Not able to enter BIOS supposedly due to the firmware is obnoxious. Is there any way to put coreboot on over the firmware or something?
Most Chromebook’s firmware is Coreboot, but it’s running a Depthcharge payload instead of UEFI (or BIOS or whatever. Mr. Chromebox maintains UEFI Coreboot payloads and install tools for a wide variety of (x86) Chromebooks, which can be used to flash a normal UEFI payload and boot normal OSes. It’s strictly possible to boot normal Linux systems on a the Depthcharge payload modern Chromebooks use, but uh… here’s the gentoo wiki on it, it’s a substantial pain in the ass.
Yep I did that to my school Chromebook, they never asked for it back when I graduated and being a broke college student I decided to UEFI flash it and use it as a cheap Linux Computer, still using it now. It’s not the fastest laptop but it’s certainly good enough. It’s really dumb that they enforce software expiration dates on these PCs when they’re probably fully capable of running the next version perfectly fine.
Not Chromebook related, but I have an Asus G72GX laptop from around 2010 I bought refurbished, it was meant to be used for gaming, but it’s performance wasn’t very good. Got married, life happened and finally dug it out of storage this year. Replaced battery, installed windows 10 (had 7) and started using it for work as a developer. It handles it remarkably well considering it’s age.
I had to force windows 10 to install by jumping through all kinds of hoops, but I haven’t noticed a difference in it’s performance.
However, if I reboot, I often get stuck in a boot loop with a different error each time it reboots, but I somehow magically get it to the login screen by doing some kind of computer version of the Konami code, except I don’t know what the code is.
That being said, I am curious if It would be more beneficial to install Linux. I have no experience with it. All I use it for is VSCode mainly.
I never tried using WIndows on my Chromebook before, heard that it really performs badly on Chromebook hardware. You might have better luck with Linux if the error is happening in Windows so it might be worth giving it a shot.
Apologies for the long wait for a response. Been trying to get back to people.
I checked out the Chromebook I have and made a post on the Gentoo form, but don’t believe I’m able to do it for my particular model because of how I’m sandboxed in a subsystem of something. Could I DM you and we could chat more about sending Chrome OS to the shadow realm?
Sure, drop me a note with the details and I’ll see if I can give you a hand. I’m not super expert in all the specifics of the Chromebook ecosystem, but I have good general computer/Unix skills and have hacked a couple so I know where to look for resources.
Awesome! I’ll send you a DM a bit later with some details about the Chromebook when I dig through the mountain of stuff in front of me. Appreciate the help :)
At a guess - they’re likely selling those laptops at a loss and making the money back on (hopefully) service contracts or (probably) selling your data. As soon as you install a custom OS they won’t support you (so you won’t buy support) and they won’t be able to sell your data.
Sorry for the late response, I’ve been wading through my inbox to get back to most :)
That’s gotta be why they make it so damn hard to uninstall ChromeOS… I like that Linux is being popularized more, but I hear whispers from the F(L)OSS community in my head that Canonical and Microsoft are one in the same. Its a bit confusing some of the rhetoric surrounding certain companies and software other than the blatantly obvious like Microsoft or Google, but I’ll never quite understand programmer “martian”…
Have you worked on chrome books before and swapped the OS?
That doesn’t really add up. If they would sell them at a loss, they would want you to use them as long as possible.
ok I’ll bite, can’t they reinstall the chromebooks with linux instead?
Sure, but then they have to pay the salaries of an IT department to not only do the OS install on thousands of devices, but also provide support when things go wonky from kids doing dumb shit (it’s Linux; there will be that one kid who figures out how to gain su privileges and convinces a couple others to rm -f / their shit). The same thought crossed my mind, but these are low spec $200 laptops that I really don’t think it would be financially viable to do so.
Teach the kids to do it themselves - this allergy towards teaching any kind of computer skills these days is ridiculous.
There’s a pretty wide distinction between navigating a linear OS like Windows and OSX, and a flavor of Linux, especially if the teacher isn’t familiar with it themselves.
I don’t necessarily agree it would be all that difficult, but either way I can’t think of a more essential skill to be teaching with those chromebooks.
great scenario for an immutable distro
Really if they were going to do anything it’d be thin clients, the real “immutable” distro
Hey Mike Judge should make a movie about this
I’ve been looking into getting a cheapo laptop to take outside, and Chromebooks caught my interest. However, literally everyone I spoke to about this idea recommended against it. After researching all the nuances to putting baremetal Linux on a $40 Chromebook (BIOS screws, firmware patches, etc), all so I could have 2GiB RAM and 16GiB of unreplaceable storage, I asked myself what the point even was. I might as well buy a(nother) Thinkpad T40 at that point.
Glad I didn’t go with the Chromebook. Got a 2018 HP secondhand from a local college. For a little extra money, I have something with superior construction, specs, and upgrade potential.
I would agree that if you’re looking to buy a cheap computer an older Thinkpad beats a Chromebook by a long shot. Main benefit to Chromebooks is that if you get lucky you can obtain them for free, mine was permanently loaned to me by my high school (I didn’t technically steal it from them, they just never asked for it back). I would’ve much preferred an old Thinkpad with Coreboot but the Chromebook was free so I can’t really complain.
Used laptops are the shit for basic web browsing.
I just found a Lenovo T470s at a flea market (Flea@MIT, for anyone in the Boston area), 6th gen i5, 2x4GB RAM, and 128GB NVMe, with charger and W10 license…for $100.
I bought a 1TB NVMe and a 16GB SODIMM for like $80. Dual-booting Fedora and W10 (fresh-installed…I don’t trust someone else’s installation). Since getting it (Fathers Day), I only needed Windows one time (Linux Fire Toolbox wasn’t working too well for me with my Prime-Day Kindle Fire).
As a plus, the battery life is supreme as well, and upgrading the ram and NVMe were stupid simple, as they are on most the Lenovo T-series.
I was part of one of the first high school classes in the country to get chromebooks and oh boy were they AWFUL. Constant freezing, crashes, failure to boot them, all kinds of battery issues. For about six months we had teachers who relentlessly put their tests online and had us take t them on our chromebooks, but eventually most of them switched to paper because of the inevitable three-or-so students who would go “mine’s not turning on” or “the screen’s broken.” They were fragile as hell too. The school said we’d lose our warranty if we were caught using them without the case, but even when they were inside the case they would regularly come out with cracked screens and broken keys. The internet speed on them was atrocious too. Our school wasn’t known for ultra fast internet (in fact, some spots even were a cellphone data dead spot), but we had more than a dozen incidents of students using their phones to do assignments because the chromebook just wasn’t connecting. The school had one IT technician and four librarians for a school of about 750, and they were working pretty much overtime due to how often the chromebooks would break.
I remember at the start they said we only had one free repair and then every repair after that would cost us $50, but the school had to change it to 3 free repairs because everybody’s chromebook (including mine) broke.
