UngodlyAudreyđłď¸ââ§ď¸Built-in software âdeath datesâ are sending thousands of schoolsâ Chromebooks to the recycling bin
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Reviving Chromebooks with Ubuntu: Autonomous Servers, Planned Obsolescence, and Permacomputing
A tutorial and slight manifesto on reviving end-of-life Chromebooks. How to make them into autonomous servers, and why we need to rethink computing in the age of climate collapse.
Thatâs what they should be doing, but it isnât what theyâre going to do, unfortunately.
Kimathi Bradford, a 16-year-old Oakland tech repair intern, has looked into whether there was a way to replace the outdated Chromebook software with a non-Google brand, but it ended up being a lot of work, Kimathi said, and the open-source replacement wasnât up to par. âItâs like the Fritos of software,â he said. âNo one really wants to use it.â
Now, Iâm not sure if what they tried was Linux, but I wouldnât be too surprised. The younger generations grew up with smartphones; I feel as though operating systems will become more streamlined and opaque as time goes on. I suspect weâll have to contend with the phonification of mainstream computing in the coming years.
lucidwielderSorry but Fritos of software is dumb & in no way representative of bringing old chromebooks back to life beyond their support date.
Schools often buy the bottom baseline of everything & in now way was a 4gb of ram a good, decent or proper experience to begin w/ & their replacements probably also had 4gb of ram - just a faster cpu, gpu & ram to hide that itâs lacking ram still.
I think schools could easily band together & make their own education focused Linux distro & then just focus on hardware thatâs compatible w/ thatâs Chromebooks or Windows laptops. Hard part would be building out an on par MDM &/or ldap server if not using a Windows server.
All Chromebook are is a browser basically. It already is the bag of Fritos imho. I think the hard part though would be to hire an IT guy that knows Linux better than the students tbh. Schools already under pay teachers in the US & that goes 2-3x for IT staff.
theneverfoxI mean, underpaid IT aside, do they need to be better than the students?
We like to organize school like thereâs rules, you follow them, and if you do better it must be because you are better.
But thats not how the world works, and itâs not how technology works - itâs all about understanding the system and looking for loopholes
Is it better to enforce absolute control though? It teaches you nothing but how to be a good cog in the machine.
Teaching you that the rules arenât absolute, but requires skill and legwork gives you a mindset to actually succeed in our warped little resource allocation game. Instead you should teach them to consider the effects - if they crash the network, make school suck for everyone for a few days.
But as to your original point, you still need an admin who can at least manage the network, and they should be given the funds to pay for that