Comment by cerement@slrpnk.net on Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin

There are few things quite as emblematic of late stage capitalism than the concept of “planned obsolescence”.

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.)

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.

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 …

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Kimathi Bradford, a 16-year-old Oakland tech repair intern, has looked into whether there was a way to replace the outdated Chromebook software with a non-Google brand, but it ended up being a lot of work, Kimathi said, and the open-source replacement wasn’t up to par.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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.

The first PC my family had, and thus first computer I had extensive experience with, was a Dell Pentium 4 running XP. Yeah, obviously I used a file system implicitly, but I remember thinking later when I entered college and the workforce that I was deprived of learning how to use a “real” computer because I didn’t get to experience the consumer PCs of the 80s. I didn’t have experience with a C64, I didn’t need to learn BASIC or a command line just to use the computer. As a user, understanding how reads and writes to disk happened, and how to make the best use of my working memory wasn’t necessary, the OS handled it all. I just needed to know to click “eject” first. And yet I’m doing fine (I think :D).

My point is, every generation will be able to say “I grew up with a dumbed down computing experience”. But I’m more optimistic about this I think. I welcome a generation of computer scientists who think completely differently about how files should be organized. It’s not important that I know BASIC, and maybe it’s not important that today’s students think in terms of file systems. They’re still smart people, they’ll still need to learn trees and graphs to solve problems. They just won’t be pre-programmed with assumptions and requirements that may not exist anymore or in future hardware.

so they think that reformatting is wiping the drive clean instead of recreating ntfs/exfat metadata files

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/

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.

Same thing it does for any instution that loans out hardware, e.g. employers:

monitoring
remote lockdown / wipe
remote management of installed software
etc.

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.

@UngodlyAudrey @cerement there’s chrultrabook project focused on allowing to install Windows or Linux https://chrultrabook.github.io/docs/

@selfisekai @UngodlyAudrey @cerement
Person you’ve linked to clearly didn’t bother reading the documentation.
Ubuntu is unsupported (any distro that sticks close to mainline will work).
RW_LEGACY doesn’t work correctly, newer models don’t use WP screws anymore.

@elly @selfisekai @UngodlyAudrey @cerement To be fair, that Substack article was written in May, before Chultrabook documentation pages were written - and before that there were only some random pages and the whole Discord server.

I think that instead of pointing kiddos to Discord server and serving them one by one, the focus should be moved to polishing documentation, so everyone could at least throw a link to the part explictly noting that RW_LEGACY/Ubuntu/something other is broken/unsupportable .-.

@BluRaf @UngodlyAudrey @cerement @selfisekai Yep, that’s what we’re doing

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

Well, given that android would be Unix based he was probably talking about a Linux distro being a lot of work, which it can be if applied to individual computers, instead of a network.

What kind of monster doesn’t like Fritos?

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Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin(www.mercurynews.com)

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