Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin
Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin
Doubling the lifespan of older Chromebooks would save California’s schools $225 million, according to advocacy group CALPIRG.
There are few things quite as emblematic of late stage capitalism than the concept of "planned obsolescence".
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Kimathi Bradford, a 16-year-old Oakland tech repair intern, has looked into whether there was a way to replace the outdated Chromebook software with a non-Google brand, but it ended up being a lot of work, Kimathi said, and the open-source replacement wasn’t up to par.
I call major BS on this. Unless chromebooks have even more built in jails and tyrants (like cpu throttling and BIOS emprisonment), the modern GNU/Linux more than satisfies the average student.
Issue is that Chromebooks have "googled" UEFIs specifically meant to lock down the system, and the Chrome OS boot directory is even on ROM, so it's super difficult to actually get rid of Chrome OS for another operating system. I also imagine you can't just boot a "regular" full featured Linux distro on it without, like they said, a ton of work.
If you can get mainstream Linux working, then yes it should satisfy the vast majority of students, but as far as I know you need highly specialized distros specifically designed to circumvent the hardware lockouts, which are rather niche and don't get the same level of development as a mainstream distro.
That's horrible. It seems like the only viable solution is to ban all proprietary software in schools to prevent this kind of power imbalance in the future.
Rms was always right.
Also has the benefit of getting students used to open source software so they are most likely to continue using it in their careers and adulthood in general. The biggest reason people stay on proprietary software despite all the bullshit is because they've always used it and are most familiar with it, and think learning something new would be too difficult, especially if they use it for their jobs and would actually end up having trouble figuring it out at work for a while if they switched. Which would be mostly solved if kids grew up with Linux to begin with instead of Windows or Chrome OS; LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office, etc.
RISC-V has a similar hope for their project. Currently, proprietary microarchitectures can't really be used to teach microprocessor design/engineering in school since they're trade secrets, so students are pretty much stuck with imaginary teaching architectures and have to re-learn the real ones once they get hired at Intel or Arm or whatever. But since many real RISC-V processors are open source, they can cut the middleman and directly be the teaching architecture, and they hope that means tons of engineers graduate already with the knowledge to work with RISC-V in the field.