Enshittification

I use the old chrome book I have for writing. It was pretty easy to throw Linux on there. Was cheap when I bought it years ago, and still has like 10 hours of battery life. Just don't expect it to do much other than text processing and simple Web stuff.

If I remember correctly, they're all core-boot-able, which is neat. Can't do that with most other laptops.

Like, I see the problem, but my school actually gave out iPads, which I feel was worse. On the chrome book, you can at least access the file system and Linux.

Ya know they make a valid point. Part of the learning experience growing up and going to school in the 90s and early 00s was figuring out how to bypass the school's restrictions with proxies, or how to load Quake 2 onto every computer in the district so we could sneak and have little impromptu LAN parties, etc. Hell, one of us got caught hacking into the student records portal to change his grades and after he graduated they hired the kid to work in the IT department. He works for a local ISP now.

Nowadays they don't know how to use a computer, they just know how to click icons and get apps from sanctioned app stores.

I just bought one of these for $35 dollars and put Linux mint on it

walled gardens... so... just like Apple did, decades earlier?

Apple did the same thing in the 80s and 90s. Then schools eventually said "no thanks" and switched to PCs for all the computer labs.

This has very little to do with Chromebooks. It's happening in countries where they are rare as well. The main cause is the fact that things for the most part just... work now. The experience on PCs and especially smartphones has become so streamlined that it doesn't require that much knowledge to be able to use them at a sufficient level. Plus smartphones have become the default device for most people so they almost never have to interact with stuff like the file system or anything complex. Most people don't care about understanding how computers work more than what they need them for, and that's fine.

At my school the windows PC's were just as locked down as the Chromebooks. In either case, you clicked the chrome icon and went. I don't agree with this take

Where I live, Chromebooks never really took off. I had access to computers since kindergarten, but in my home I only had phones, so I mostly learned tinkering with them (installing custom ROMs, cracking, etc.) until I got an old Intel Atom with 2GB of RAM lol (I tried **anything **to get pirated games running). My younger sibling and cousins never really learned much about computers because they were introduced directly to smartphones, and since they weren't taught very much (other than basic Office tasks), they were never interested on computers nor my family was buying something kids didn't ask for. So in my case, Chromebooks didn't have anything to do, it was mostly bad parenting and the boom of smartphones :P

as a kid in middle school I had one, got annoyed enough with it to figure out how to sidload a Linux distro via the command line and just used that (just before Chromebooks had the line thing built in).

Probably what got me more into the more decentralized focused part of the internet

Finally someone who is sane & smart

Like this wasn't Apple's fault. Remember that ad where the kid doesn't know what a "computer" was?

Anyone selling a computer to an institution, like a school or company, it is expected that they will be locked down, especially if the end user isn't technical.

If anything, if google didn't make things locked down and controlled schools would never have bought them and had to worry about debugging the 20 kid's messed up environments.

Kids SHOULD have been tinkering with their own private computers, a laptop from their parents or something like that.

The issue is

1. All tech companies, Google, Apple, Microsoft, are all pushing for users to store their stuff in their clouds instead of locally on their machines and having to worry about their local filesystems, and their local environments.

2. Software as a Service, or much better environment standardization through things like steam means if you want to just use software it usually works without much effort. You don't need to debug bad installs or dive through the installations unless you want to mod things, and even then many things have native mod support so you don't even need to poke through the folder structure or understand how software loading works to run sophisticated mods for most games.

I’m on the millennial train here, and am fully onboard with the monopolization angle, but this is taking it a bit far? Chromebooks aren’t that bad.

Stepping back and maybe over generalizing again, I think the problem might be… attention spans? Like kids are so bombarded with feeds and notification spam that, on average, there’s less patience to sit down, look stuff up, and neurotically tinker (which was still the vast minority in my generation). Its the same problem leading to less interest in literature, TV, anything long form.

Learning the bare minimum to function in Windows is not exactly “tech literate” to me, it just happens to be the system so many businesses are stuck with, and some generations were forced to learn by coincidence. Looking back, modern Android and iOS are really accessible by comparison, though of course they have enshittification issues.