795
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
795 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37707 readers
30 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Comments upon comments ignorant of the realities of the privacy laws governing this domain and the implications on firmware, driver and OS security support. "Just install Linux on it" is a completely unworkable solution. As some have pointed out, the places where this is done have a much thicker IT departments staffed with higher grade professionals to make it work. The thing to be mad here about is the shit support from vendors across the stack. If I had to guess, the worst offenders are probably the SoC vendors who typically ship firmware and driver updates as is the tradition.
Yeah, bulk imaging computers is really only limited to how many you can hook up to the network. I used to have to image hundreds of computers a day at times, and really the longest part was walking around and restarting them all so they'd PXE boot. The actual process maybe took 2 hours since all the computers were on 100Mb/s connections.
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.