MBCook“This is not the computer for you”
https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer-for-you/
> A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself.
I'm in the same boat as the author; I cut my teeth on a hand-me-down 2005 eMac, then a hand-me-down 2008 Macbook, before finally getting my own 2011 iMac. I think this is overly harsh on Chromebooks given they belong to the cheaper end of the market - you can still put linux on them and go for gold, you're just going to hit earlier resource limits.
I think when you're younger and building an aptitude for computers, it's the limitations of what you have that drive an off-the-shelf challenge: doing what you can with what you've got. That can vary from just trying to play the same video games as your friends (love what /r/lowendgaming does), usage restrictions (e.g locked down school issued laptops) or running professional tooling (very slowly) just like the author.
When IT caught my interest, I did all of the above - on Mac, Windows and Linux, on completely garbage machines. The Macbook Neo is an awesome machine for it's cost/value, but I don't think it's hugely special in the respect described beyond making more power available at a more accessible price point.
When Chromebooks originally came out, that was not an option. And almost all school-issued computers will not let you do this.
Author of the post here. You nailed it here; I used Chromebook as the example in my post since the one I used in high school was locked down to basically a kiosk. Couldn’t even open dev tools, much less root it. Such a wild departure from the eMacs I used in my elementary school’s library where I could set bonkers `defaults write` commands and customize every aspect of my account.
If I got a Chromebook as a personal machine as a kid, I probably would’ve rooted it and see what I could do, but growing up, the beauty of the Mac (in that Snow Leopard era) was progressive disclosure. I could start on the happy path and have a perfectly stable machine, then customize the behaviors through the terminal, see what it does, mess with the system files, see what breaks, revert it, then go back to using iMovie like normal.
In my (admittedly limited) time using a rooted Chromebook, it’s much more like a switch flip. You go from mandatory water wings directly into getting pushed into the ocean and Google shouting “Good luck!!”
macOS or Windows can be similarly locked down. In the schools, the school locks it down. In many companies, there are management tools like JAMF, InTune, or NinjaOne that lock down laptops, desktops, tablets, and cell phones a little or completely.