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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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I converted one of these Chromebooks to Linux as a test project and the results were, not good.
To start, they have a bootloader lock screw under the motherboard, so you have to take the entire laptop apart to load anything but unsupported ChromeOS.
Then you have to use a Google tool, can't remember the specific one, to swap the bootloader. That might be possible to automate but I didn't look into it because...
... The hardware sucks. We're talking like 4GB of storage on a lot of these Chromebooks. The driver support is all over the place, and there are issues everywhere even on "supported" distros.
With the vast amount of junk Chromebooks out there, I'm sure community hospice support will get better, but it's never going to be an easy bulk conversion because of how common the bootloader locks are.