There are few things quite as emblematic of late stage capitalism than the concept of âplanned obsolescenceâ.
Thatâs what they should be doing, but it isnât what theyâre 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Kimathi Bradford, a 16-year-old Oakland tech repair intern, has looked into whether there was a way to replace the outdated Chromebook software with a non-Google brand, but it ended up being a lot of work, Kimathi said, and the open-source replacement wasnât up to par. âItâs like the Fritos of software,â he said. âNo one really wants to use it.â
Now, Iâm not sure if what they tried was Linux, but I wouldnât 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 weâll 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 itâs not just a guide - itâs a team of people working for weeks to get it set up. Of course to us itâs easy, itâd just be a computer or two. To an entire company/school it may be over a million dollars to swap over
Agree. Iâve got a chromebook running Linux, for that I had to open it up and remove a screw. It takes around 15 minutes if youâve done it before, so for bulk migration to Linux itâs not feasible.
Youâre saying itâs 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 itâs obviously not nearly linear. The difference in cost between managing 1000 and 2000 systems would be negligible.
Itâs 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 canât 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 havenât (will never) had the experience of owning chromebook as a student, what does the MDM will do here? Cheating prevention?
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 thatâs famous for smelling like the bacteria that festers between dogsâ toes: https://be.chewy.com/is-this-normal-why-do-my-dogs-feet-smell-like-fritos/
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 itâs lacking ram still.
I think schools could easily band together & make their own education focused Linux distro & then just focus on hardware thatâs compatible w/ thatâs 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 thereâs rules, you follow them, and if you do better it must be because you are better.
But thats not how the world works, and itâs not how technology works - itâs 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 arenât 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
Iâve 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.
Iâm 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 ârealâ computer because I didnât get to experience the consumer PCs of the 80s. I didnât have experience with a C64, I didnât 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 wasnât necessary, the OS handled it all. I just needed to know to click âejectâ first. And yet Iâm doing fine (I think :D).
My point is, every generation will be able to say âI grew up with a dumbed down computing experienceâ. But Iâm more optimistic about this I think. I welcome a generation of computer scientists who think completely differently about how files should be organized. Itâs not important that I know BASIC, and maybe itâs not important that todayâs students think in terms of file systems. Theyâre still smart people, theyâll still need to learn trees and graphs to solve problems. They just wonât be pre-programmed with assumptions and requirements that may not exist anymore or in future hardware.
@UngodlyAudrey @cerement thereâs chrultrabook project focused on allowing to install Windows or Linux https://chrultrabook.github.io/docs/
@selfisekai @UngodlyAudrey @cerement
Person youâve linked to clearly didnât bother reading the documentation.
Ubuntu is unsupported (any distro that sticks close to mainline will work).
RW_LEGACY doesnât work correctly, newer models donât 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 .-.
