happyhippo ,

I have preordered a framework laptop which will run Linux until it fucking blows up or falls apart.

Enough with being screwed over by well known brands whose interest is just selling you more and more stuff.

HawlSera ,

Planned Obsolesce should be a crime

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

I would have agreed with that statement until I saw the most recent Technology Connections video about why the incandescent light bulb has planned obsolescence built in. Sometimes it’s not malicious but to actually provide a compromise leading to an overall better product.

I don’t think software death dates count, tho.

HawlSera ,

Software Death Dates strike me as more “Malware” than “Compromise”

ConsciousCode ,

That wasn’t planned obsolescence though, it was an industry-created standard for the tradeoff between efficiency, brightness, and lifespan. Planned obsolescence is specifically when a product is made to break sooner than it needs to.

FirstMajesticComet ,
@FirstMajesticComet@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Light bulbs aren’t planned obsolescence though, he even said as much in the video, light bulbs more akin to dish-soap which eventually runs out then a device made to be obsolete faster. They are consumable items, which run out or burn out, they are not expensive appliances with long lives, hell he even pointed out that some utilities gave them away for free.

fulano ,

but to actually provide a compromise leading to an overall better product.

Could you elaborate a bit more on that?

zhunk ,

For incandescent lightbulbs, his point was that bulbs can burn fast and bright or low and slow, and standardizing on a lifespan of 1000 hours was a sweet spot between performance and longevity. For example, it makes 60W bulbs from different manufacturers more interchangeable and less prone to tricky marketing gimmicks like a “long life” 60W bulb that’s dimmer.

fulano ,

Thank you for explaining this concept. I still don’t see how it can be considered planned obsolescence, though. It looks more like a matter of optimizing the output and doing a tradeoff for more performance.

I see planned obsolescence as artificially limiting the longevity or repairability of a product, without any benefit at all, but with the intention of making it less durable. A good example could be locked smartphones without updates.

But perhaps, the definition of planned obsolescence is broader than i think.

Gnubyte ,

TLDR: I’m still very suspicious of how that is quantified - “leading to an overall better product”.

Who quantifies that and how, on a case by case basis, especially in the form of Chromebooks or phones for revenant, popular examples?

Let’s say it was a laptop: I can see issues with lithium batteries perhaps reaching a cycle count that lead them to be dangerous. Wouldn’t that mean though you should produce a good that has replaceable batteries? Is the battery designed in such a manner on purpose?

Businesses with shareholders that live quarter to quarterly profit are the issue. There is no authoritarian legislator that reallocates resources like China did the last few years, for example, whether you like it or not.

The US relies on legislation to be passed to mandate the changes or prohibit a device from being built a certain way. That legislation can be lobbied for loopholes, have various people in power also own percentages of the companies, etc. Whether you agree with it or not, there are many checks and balances and simultaneously a lack thereof.

chicken ,

Good, maybe that will get them to stop using Chrome OS in schools, it has been a disaster for computer literacy in general.

Blackmist ,

Not just schools. PCs have been on the decline against phones and tablets for ages now.

If they don’t have them at home, they won’t learn shit about them.

JEB5w9 ,

The service life of the devices was known up-front. You can check for yourself the service life dates of every Chrome OS machine here:

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en

The correct deployment strategy would be to make a big purchase at the front end of a device’s lifecycle and then only replacements from then on out so that you get the most out of every machine. Future capital purchases would be with a new device and termination date.

anormalusername ,
@anormalusername@beehaw.org avatar

I think this point is really important, and allow me to go one step further: I work in the public sector of education and purchasing technology is such a complex issue that IT governance has to be involved with decisions like this. That’s to say that, without a governing body to review purchases (outside of whoever handles the actual procurement, i.e. funds leaving the bank account), mistakes like this will happen.

We can be upset with planned obsolescence, but there’s distinctly a human error here where there wasn’t enough research and planning.

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

QuoteNat ,

I mean, even if just installing a different OS were an option, you’d need to install and setup that OS on a few hundred computers or more. I used to work for a place that would essentially do the enterprise enrollment in bulk before shipping off the computers to schools. I could only setup a bit under 100 over an 8 hour workday, assuming no major issues (like captchas on the login step, or the wifi going out). Keep in mind that we also had specialized little microcontroller* USBs specifically for doing all the enrollment keypresses, and enough of those for someone to setup multiple computers at once.

I am actually curious as to how you would make a locked down managed linux OS akin to ChromeOS. Maybe there would be a way to do something like that that’s also faster to setup, but idk.

*centipedes are the name for the ones we used.

Waraugh ,

Thank you for sharing your experience along with that link.

avidamoeba , (edited )
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

That’s exactly the problem. The standard GNU/Linux distro isn’t suitable to allow carrying the responsibility that an innumerable number of users with physical access won’t be able to pwn those machines. Machines that are used by others too. You absolutely can make an OS like that out of Debian or Ubuntu, or what have you. Google has - Chrome OS - but it’ll take a significant development effort. You’d have to basically redo at least some of the work they’ve done. And let’s say you did all of that. Then you end up deploying it on an ARM-based fleet. And there’s a wild vulnerability in the WiFi firmware blob, and the SoC vendor no longer supports it. Every student has root and we’re back to the original problem. 👨‍🚀🔫

And that’s why instead of getting hardware from a vendor and hoping for the best, you might want to get it in writing that they’ll support their crap till a date. Then you stamp that as the EOL date for that laptop and you present it as part of the spec to whoever might want to buy this laptop. There’s no escaping this problem unless there are no proprietary blobs on the system, which is unlikely for ARM, or you have a solid development team and you’re large enough to have a source sharing contract with the vendor that lets your team fix the vulnerabilities and support the hardware for as long as you like. It’s probably much easier to achieve on x86, which costs more per unit up front.

HiddenLayer5 ,
@HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml avatar

I am actually curious as to how you would make a locked down managed linux OS akin to ChromeOS.

Because Linus Torvalds stupidly refused to change the Linux license to GPL3.

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

What difference would the kernel licence make in this context?

thepianistfroggollum ,

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.

TechnoBabble ,

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.

gronjo45 ,

Awful!!! I remember using those junktops when I was in high school…

Made me realize I still have one lying around and I tried to put Linux on it, but they seem to only let you sandbox Linux in it…? Not able to enter BIOS supposedly due to the firmware is obnoxious. Is there any way to put coreboot on over the firmware or something?

abhibeckert ,

At a guess - they’re likely selling those laptops at a loss and making the money back on (hopefully) service contracts or (probably) selling your data. As soon as you install a custom OS they won’t support you (so you won’t buy support) and they won’t be able to sell your data.

undnocheiner ,

That doesn’t really add up. If they would sell them at a loss, they would want you to use them as long as possible.

gronjo45 ,

Sorry for the late response, I’ve been wading through my inbox to get back to most :)

That’s gotta be why they make it so damn hard to uninstall ChromeOS… I like that Linux is being popularized more, but I hear whispers from the F(L)OSS community in my head that Canonical and Microsoft are one in the same. Its a bit confusing some of the rhetoric surrounding certain companies and software other than the blatantly obvious like Microsoft or Google, but I’ll never quite understand programmer “martian”…

Have you worked on chrome books before and swapped the OS?

PAPPP , (edited )

Most Chromebook’s firmware is Coreboot, but it’s running a Depthcharge payload instead of UEFI (or BIOS or whatever). Mr. Chromebox maintains UEFI Coreboot payloads and install tools for a wide variety of (x86) Chromebooks, which can be used to flash a normal UEFI payload and boot normal OSes. It’s strictly possible to boot normal Linux systems on a the Depthcharge payload modern Chromebooks use, but uh… here’s the gentoo wiki on it, it’s a substantial pain in the ass.

FirstMajesticComet ,
@FirstMajesticComet@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Yep I did that to my school Chromebook, they never asked for it back when I graduated and being a broke college student I decided to UEFI flash it and use it as a cheap Linux Computer, still using it now. It’s not the fastest laptop but it’s certainly good enough. It’s really dumb that they enforce software expiration dates on these PCs when they’re probably fully capable of running the next version perfectly fine.

reric88 , (edited )
@reric88@beehaw.org avatar

Not Chromebook related, but I have an Asus G72GX laptop from around 2010 I bought refurbished, it was meant to be used for gaming, but it’s performance wasn’t very good. Got married, life happened and finally dug it out of storage this year. Replaced battery, installed windows 10 (had 7) and started using it for work as a developer. It handles it remarkably well considering it’s age.

I had to force windows 10 to install by jumping through all kinds of hoops, but I haven’t noticed a difference in it’s performance.

However, if I reboot, I often get stuck in a boot loop with a different error each time it reboots, but I somehow magically get it to the login screen by doing some kind of computer version of the Konami code, except I don’t know what the code is.

That being said, I am curious if It would be more beneficial to install Linux. I have no experience with it. All I use it for is VSCode mainly.

FirstMajesticComet ,
@FirstMajesticComet@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I never tried using WIndows on my Chromebook before, heard that it really performs badly on Chromebook hardware. You might have better luck with Linux if the error is happening in Windows so it might be worth giving it a shot.

gronjo45 ,

Apologies for the long wait for a response. Been trying to get back to people.

I checked out the Chromebook I have and made a post on the Gentoo form, but don’t believe I’m able to do it for my particular model because of how I’m sandboxed in a subsystem of something. Could I DM you and we could chat more about sending Chrome OS to the shadow realm?

PAPPP ,

Sure, drop me a note with the details and I’ll see if I can give you a hand. I’m not super expert in all the specifics of the Chromebook ecosystem, but I have good general computer/Unix skills and have hacked a couple so I know where to look for resources.

gronjo45 ,

Awesome! I’ll send you a DM a bit later with some details about the Chromebook when I dig through the mountain of stuff in front of me. Appreciate the help :)

OneCardboardBox ,

I’ve been looking into getting a cheapo laptop to take outside, and Chromebooks caught my interest. However, literally everyone I spoke to about this idea recommended against it. After researching all the nuances to putting baremetal Linux on a $40 Chromebook (BIOS screws, firmware patches, etc), all so I could have 2GiB RAM and 16GiB of unreplaceable storage, I asked myself what the point even was. I might as well buy a(nother) Thinkpad T40 at that point.

Glad I didn’t go with the Chromebook. Got a 2018 HP secondhand from a local college. For a little extra money, I have something with superior construction, specs, and upgrade potential.

bermuda ,
@bermuda@beehaw.org avatar

I was part of one of the first high school classes in the country to get chromebooks and oh boy were they AWFUL. Constant freezing, crashes, failure to boot them, all kinds of battery issues. For about six months we had teachers who relentlessly put their tests online and had us take t them on our chromebooks, but eventually most of them switched to paper because of the inevitable three-or-so students who would go “mine’s not turning on” or “the screen’s broken.” They were fragile as hell too. The school said we’d lose our warranty if we were caught using them without the case, but even when they were inside the case they would regularly come out with cracked screens and broken keys. The internet speed on them was atrocious too. Our school wasn’t known for ultra fast internet (in fact, some spots even were a cellphone data dead spot), but we had more than a dozen incidents of students using their phones to do assignments because the chromebook just wasn’t connecting. The school had one IT technician and four librarians for a school of about 750, and they were working pretty much overtime due to how often the chromebooks would break.

I remember at the start they said we only had one free repair and then every repair after that would cost us $50, but the school had to change it to 3 free repairs because everybody’s chromebook (including mine) broke.

jasondj ,

Used laptops are the shit for basic web browsing.

I just found a Lenovo T470s at a flea market (Flea@MIT, for anyone in the Boston area), 6th gen i5, 2x4GB RAM, and 128GB NVMe, with charger and W10 license…for $100.

I bought a 1TB NVMe and a 16GB SODIMM for like $80. Dual-booting Fedora and W10 (fresh-installed…I don’t trust someone else’s installation). Since getting it (Fathers Day), I only needed Windows one time (Linux Fire Toolbox wasn’t working too well for me with my Prime-Day Kindle Fire).

As a plus, the battery life is supreme as well, and upgrading the ram and NVMe were stupid simple, as they are on most the Lenovo T-series.

FirstMajesticComet ,
@FirstMajesticComet@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I would agree that if you’re looking to buy a cheap computer an older Thinkpad beats a Chromebook by a long shot. Main benefit to Chromebooks is that if you get lucky you can obtain them for free, mine was permanently loaned to me by my high school (I didn’t technically steal it from them, they just never asked for it back). I would’ve much preferred an old Thinkpad with Coreboot but the Chromebook was free so I can’t really complain.

Poutinetown ,

Those are great for hosting a Ubuntu server (as long as they are not CPU intensive). You can buy a dongle to connect it to the router for Ethernet, then add a SD card or connect a hard drive by USB and it’s quite solid. There’s a few tweaks needed but it’s an incredible learning experience.

PenguinTD ,

After reading all the comments, I’m just gonna say that if you don’t allow kids to tinker and do their thing, they will learn a lot slower and your “investment” will be left mostly unused. (age range proper hardware/OS of course.) The school policy is not doing the kids a favor, it’s a waste of time and tax money that you cultivate a generation of people get used to chrome book and google apps. That’s the ultimate purpose for school license being cheaper.

Catasaur , (edited )
@Catasaur@lemmy.catasaur.xyz avatar

We’ve got young adults entering the workforce that cannot comprehend what a filesystem and directory structure is due to 10+ years of these sandboxed, guard-railed tech products.

PenguinTD ,

I now understand that existential crisis that people become too dumb or not capable of operating technologies developed by previous generation.(like the Walle movie.)

cupcakezealot ,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Hey Mike Judge should make a movie about this

arthur ,
@arthur@lemmy.ml avatar

All of these machines make for decent Linux laptops. I picked up an EOL Chromebook for $35 last year and installed Debian on it. Decent little machine. Not terribly fast but very useable.

astroturds ,

I turned one into an Emacs machine, it was £20 and I fucking love it. It’s built like a tank too. It’s a dell Chromebook 11.

CanadaPlus ,

Good to know. Is it still a PITA to make the firmware let you change the OS?

arthur ,
@arthur@lemmy.ml avatar

Most modern ones it’s just commands you have to run. You can usually find an easy walk-though on the MrChromebox website. I haven’t seen one that required a jumper or anything in a LONG time.

astroturds ,

Mine was really easy (dell chromebook 11), just followed the instructions and I had no problems. I have another chromebook with an amd chipset that I can’t change the firmware on though (last time I checked), so if you’re planning to buy one to convert make sure you actually can do it first.

confusedbytheBasics ,

These are Linux laptops. But yes, they’ll work better if you put your preferred distro on them.

Hellebert ,

I’m currently in the market for something like a Chromebook but I’m not buying one because of stuff like this.

constantokra ,

Lenovo yoga 11e, with linux. They’re like 250 bucks and a great value. Tablet mode too. I prefer mine to my better laptops, honestly, because I don’t have to worry about it at all.

yessikg ,
@yessikg@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

If you want a fancy Chromebook, there’s the Framework Chromebook (or you could just get the regular Framework laptops)

knokelmaat ,

I am very happy using a surface go with Linux (used arch with GNOME for a while, now trying out KDE Neon for a change).

TheBaldness ,

This sounds like there’s a market for a Linux distro that behaves like ChromeOS and can be centrally managed.

Deemo ,

The problem comes down to education institutions. I remember when we got Chromebooks in my highschool (8 years ago) admins forgot to turn of developer mode and half the school unenrolled the Chromebook managing to bypass all restrictions. This went on for half a year until one day our school needed to run a state exam (more for measure of schools performance not as a college entrance exam or anything).

The computerized testing program required deploying a specific chrome app accessible when chrome book is logged out (can’t just download from chrome web store). When they tried to push the client since half of Chromebooks were unenrolled it failed. This required the school it to recall pretty much all chrome books to manually re enroll all of them and disable developer mode (prevents unenrolling and prevents sideloading Linux).

Problem is if older Chromebooks are used for Linux in an educational environment there would be nothing stopping a student from whipping up a bootable USB and dumping another distro (bypassing restrictions). I’m also not sure if there is a enrollment mode equivalent Linux (there may be but not sure).

At least that’s my two cents (not a school it admin just a memory from the past 😉).

TDCN ,
@TDCN@feddit.dk avatar

I never really understood the need for that strickt controll of the hardware… Who cares if Linux is sideloaded or if students unenroll. Imho I think if you need that strickt controll you are bound to get so many unnesseary issues down the line. Instead let student 6se what ever the fuck they want and for security just make sure they WiFi/ethernet is secure and locked down and any services the students need are behind a secure 2fa login. Treat any device as untrusted is more healthy for your security in the long run imo. If students need special software that they can’t run on their own machines you can lend them a machine for that specific task for a specific time. Problem solved.

Deemo ,

Actually in your case our school has a BYOD program (bring your own device) in which you can bring your own laptop with whatever flavor of OS. Firewall would restrict you, your device would be considered untrusted, and in testing a loaner locked down chromebook would be provided. The issue comes with non BYOD devices.

Now lets assume a school has 1k students. If they allowed os unlocking and allowed students to tinker with the os. Then they would need 2k chromebooks 1k unlockable 1k locked down for exam administration (assume the whole school needs to take it at the same time). From a admin/IT perspective why should the school need to pay double the number of chrome books just for a few students to install their favorite brand of linux.

Even under the best circumstances where support queries aren’t increased (from students softbricking/ not knowing how to use linux) and say they are able to preserve 1k unlockable chromebooks, admins would still need to replace the other 1k locked down chrome books at end of software to stay in compliance with testing software (negating any financial benefit).

stolid_agnostic ,

It’s because the school district is responsible for how the devices are used. If your kid gets around the content block and you, an ultraconservative, finds your kid watching porn, you are definitely going to do something about it.

pythonoob ,

And of course blame the school instead of the child at fault, naturally…

power ,

You blame the school instead of your parenting which is at fault*

Usually kids “misbehave” in public because of close-minded parents or parents who try to control their kid too much, and most of all parents who don’t encourage good behaviour correctly. Parents really like to blame their kid for behavioural issues when in reality they’re the reason it’s a problem. (Especially with e.g. people who have disabilities like Bipolar, Autism, ADHD, parents internally blame their kid for everything and punish the kid, even though the disturbances caused by the disorders are something you can address and help the kid with with good parenting)

I suspect most of the kids who do that kind of stuff are neurodivergent and either undiagnosed or not treated correctly by their parents and not given proper treatment

pythonoob ,

Don’t disagree at all, was just making a topical comment, not trying to do a deep dive

TDCN ,
@TDCN@feddit.dk avatar

No way it’s the schools fault if the kid sidloads anothe os. That should strip the responsibility and it’s the parents problem. Ultraconservatives can just stfu. about this.

michaelfone ,

It should, yes. But that’s not going to stop them from trying. Enough noise from a “concerned parent” will make something happen more often than not.

TDCN ,
@TDCN@feddit.dk avatar

This is why we can’t have nice things

DingoFan ,

I never really understood the need for that strickt controll of the hardware

Federal laws and rules for educational technology:

CIPPA - www.fcc.gov/…/childrens-internet-protection-act

COPPA - ftc.gov/…/childrens-online-privacy-protection-rul…

and to an extent

FERPA - www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/…/index.html

monkeysuncle ,
@monkeysuncle@beehaw.org avatar

Problem is if older Chromebooks are used for Linux in an educational environment there would be nothing stopping a student from whipping up a bootable USB and dumping another distro (bypassing restrictions). I’m also not sure if there is a enrollment mode equivalent Linux (there may be but not sure).

They could just disable booting from USB drives in the bios and password protect it. They could install something like Fedora Silverblue, or even customize the image used to include whatever modifications they want. Any changes they made to the image would be propagated through autoupdates. Kids wouldn’t have root, so they couldn’t forcibly install a different OS. Of course they could install flatpaks to their home directory, which is probably something administrators would want to prevent, but a knowledgeable student can always find ways to do what they want.

This of course requires schools/districts to hire people to manage that stuff, which could be a problem.

Deemo ,

Good point. I wasn’t sure if Chromebooks had a normal bios with password protect/option to disable USB boot for non chrom os operating systems.

FirstMajesticComet ,
@FirstMajesticComet@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

(prevents unenrolling and prevents sideloading Linux)

Should note that it’s not completely foolproof, I know because I bypassed it. It’s just not easy and technically you can get in trouble for it. Never got a ‘vacation’ for it though 😕

appel ,
@appel@whiskers.bim.boats avatar

I agree that this is very bad on google’s part of course, however I don’t think the schools should just lie down and take it. As others have said, installing their own OS should be the way to go. It doesn’t need to be 1 person manually installing the OS on each laptop, there are Infrastructure automation tool like Ansible that can, once set up, manage installation and configuration of an arbitrary number of devices. All the device needs to do is launch a web browser from what I understand, and pretty much every linux distro should be able to do that. If they choose one with a friendly DE, then it makes it easier to use for the kids. The devices will most likely run much better on an OS without bloatware too.

benbim ,

I agree that this is very bad on google’s part of course, however I don’t think the schools should just lie down and take it. As others have said, installing their own OS should be the way to go. It doesn’t need to be 1 person manually installing the OS on each laptop, there are Infrastructure automation tool like Ansible that can, once set up, manage installation and configuration of an arbitrary number of devices. All the device needs to do is launch a web browser from what I understand, and pretty much every linux distro should be able to do that. If they choose one with a friendly DE, then it makes it easier to use for the kids. The devices will most likely run much better on an OS without bloatware too.

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