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Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin
(www.mercurynews.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology
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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.
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.
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
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.