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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
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Technology
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Right, but then multiply that guide x1000 systems, losing google enterprise, switching over to a unix directory system, setting up infrastructure, network shares, printers, and everything and it's not just a guide - it's a team of people working for weeks to get it set up. Of course to us it's easy, it'd just be a computer or two. To an entire company/school it may be over a million dollars to swap over
Agree. I've got a chromebook running Linux, for that I had to open it up and remove a screw. It takes around 15 minutes if you've done it before, so for bulk migration to Linux it's not feasible.
You had to remove a screw to install Linux? Is that like a physical tampering prevention measure? Makes me think of how I had to swap a jumper to install a GPU in an old HP tower that had integrated video.
Yes it's exactly that, check out this documentation.
You're saying it's over a million dollars to revive some chromebooks? Or to build out a system that is independent from planned obsolescence? For a school district that has to operate in the long term, I think one of those is a bargain.
Also, the cost of maintaining 2 vs 1000 systems obviously scales up, but it's obviously not nearly linear. The difference in cost between managing 1000 and 2000 systems would be negligible.
Right, for a huge enterprise they would probably honestly consider it, but a school with ~1000 students? Less? It's going to be cheaper to trash those and get new ones. Don't get me wrong I think it's a terrible waste and Google is horrible for putting them in this situation, and I'd love for the open source community to offer some scripts for wiping, installing ubuntu, setting up ACLs, connecting to a domain, connecting shares, etc, but still most schools are going to see this and just say "Okay google how much money do you need for us to keep working?"
The plan on a large scale with a team sounds good, but IT at schools is a total mixed bag due to budget, etc. I’ve seen some schools where IT is just burnt out and underpaid (can’t tell which came first) and sometimes the IT team will be an old head that still reminisces about Windows NT.
It would be cool if there was an independent team that resurrected those laptops for schools. I think the problem that arises though is security.