If I’m reading this correctly (and you need to read between the lines a bit), it’s not that they literally don’t work, it’s that they aren’t capable of getting security updates. For playing Minecraft, who cares, but schools are legally obligated to keep private student information (like all their schoolwork) secure.
It’s not like there’s a LineageOS for Chromebooks and standardized firmware and drivers that can be easily deployed and updated. They mentioned in the article that open source alternatives were trialed, but that they lacked needed features and were very costly (in time, presumably) to get working.
This is just a shit sandwich all around.
From another perspective, several schools I’ve worked at have had so much vandalism and theft of Chromebooks that they won’t even consider replacing them with more costly future-proof tech. It doesn’t matter if they get 8 years of software support if students break most of them in years 1-3.
It’s not like there’s a LineageOS for Chromebooks and standardized firmware and drivers that can be easily deployed and updated. They mentioned in the article that open source alternatives were trialed, but that they lacked needed features and were very costly (in time, presumably) to get working.
You can run Linux on them, it’s the cost of getting a bunch of shitty ass chromebooks done that’s not worth it for schools.
This is exactly the issue for me. Devices used by 10-18 yo students do not last 10 years, and so it doesn’t matter if they get software support for that long.
My 12 y/o has gone through 3 Chromebooks since the pandemic, but they are $50 refurbished so who cares
Edit I have a gaming rig, and he uses the GeForce cloud gaming service on his Chromebook, and he loads into Fortnite faster than I do when we play duos
But they kinda sorta do. It is not like Chromebooks are locked down like an iPhone. I had an old Samsung Chromebook, you could just turn off trusted boot with a flick of a switch (okay it did reset your device), and just run what you wanted. It’s just with arm based stuff running what you want is not trivial. You run what you can which is often nothing.
Also the ARM vendors need to get their shit together and make useful hardware abstraction layers so they don’t have to tailor their OS and driver suite to a particular chip.
But no, there’s no profit motive for keeping older chips alive. They enjoy being able to ship a proprietary blob that only works on one generation of chip and then forget about ever updating it again.
However, the Linux ARM community (mostly driven by reverse engineering and community efforts, not the companies making these chips) have shown that you absolutely can have a sane kernel, driver, and OS setup on ARM hardware. Mobile Linux is getting good because we have proper ARM Linux drivers like panfrost and freedreno now. Work is being done to standardize mobile camera hardware with libcamera.
The big corps could’ve made these frameworks, they could’ve upstreamed their ARM drivers in mainline Linux so that the maintenance burden was lessened. They didn’t, and then they whine about how difficult it is to maintain old devices. It’s entirely a burden of their own making.
Meanwhile my PinePhone, running on an ancient Allwinner A64 SoC from 2015 with a GPU core from 2010 or so, is running the latest Linux 6.4 kernel with a fully updated stack. Thank you Linux community for doing what the shitty corps could not.
The solution is to let people use the device in any way they want and can. Software should not dictate hardware obsolescence.
If I’m reading this correctly (and you need to read between the lines a bit), it’s not that they literally don’t work, it’s that they aren’t capable of getting security updates. For playing Minecraft, who cares, but schools are legally obligated to keep private student information (like all their schoolwork) secure.
It’s not like there’s a LineageOS for Chromebooks and standardized firmware and drivers that can be easily deployed and updated. They mentioned in the article that open source alternatives were trialed, but that they lacked needed features and were very costly (in time, presumably) to get working.
This is just a shit sandwich all around.
From another perspective, several schools I’ve worked at have had so much vandalism and theft of Chromebooks that they won’t even consider replacing them with more costly future-proof tech. It doesn’t matter if they get 8 years of software support if students break most of them in years 1-3.
You can run Linux on them, it’s the cost of getting a bunch of shitty ass chromebooks done that’s not worth it for schools.
This is exactly the issue for me. Devices used by 10-18 yo students do not last 10 years, and so it doesn’t matter if they get software support for that long.
My 12 y/o has gone through 3 Chromebooks since the pandemic, but they are $50 refurbished so who cares
Edit I have a gaming rig, and he uses the GeForce cloud gaming service on his Chromebook, and he loads into Fortnite faster than I do when we play duos
But they kinda sorta do. It is not like Chromebooks are locked down like an iPhone. I had an old Samsung Chromebook, you could just turn off trusted boot with a flick of a switch (okay it did reset your device), and just run what you wanted. It’s just with arm based stuff running what you want is not trivial. You run what you can which is often nothing.
FYI Most Chromebooks are Intel CPU computers, there are a few arm based ones but majority are Intel x86_64.
Also the ARM vendors need to get their shit together and make useful hardware abstraction layers so they don’t have to tailor their OS and driver suite to a particular chip.
But no, there’s no profit motive for keeping older chips alive. They enjoy being able to ship a proprietary blob that only works on one generation of chip and then forget about ever updating it again.
However, the Linux ARM community (mostly driven by reverse engineering and community efforts, not the companies making these chips) have shown that you absolutely can have a sane kernel, driver, and OS setup on ARM hardware. Mobile Linux is getting good because we have proper ARM Linux drivers like panfrost and freedreno now. Work is being done to standardize mobile camera hardware with libcamera.
The big corps could’ve made these frameworks, they could’ve upstreamed their ARM drivers in mainline Linux so that the maintenance burden was lessened. They didn’t, and then they whine about how difficult it is to maintain old devices. It’s entirely a burden of their own making.
Meanwhile my PinePhone, running on an ancient Allwinner A64 SoC from 2015 with a GPU core from 2010 or so, is running the latest Linux 6.4 kernel with a fully updated stack. Thank you Linux community for doing what the shitty corps could not.