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Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin (www.mercurynews.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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There are few things quite as emblematic of late stage capitalism than the concept of "planned obsolescence".

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[+] 16 points 3 years ago (10 children)
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  • [–] 21 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [+] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)
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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    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.

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