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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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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 get 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