2y ago

Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin

www.mercurynews.com Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin

Doubling the lifespan of older Chromebooks would save California’s schools $225 million, according to advocacy group CALPIRG.

There are few things quite as emblematic of late stage capitalism than the concept of "planned obsolescence".

Late Stage Capitalism @lemmygrad.ml

HiddenLayer5 @lemmy.ml

2y ago

Built-in software ‘death dates’ are sending thousands of schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin

www.mercurynews.com /2023/07/24/built-in-software-death-dates-are-sending-thousands-of-schools-chromebooks-to-the-recycling-bin/

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276 comments

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?
- 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.
  
  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?
  
  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.
  
  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 :)
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  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?
  
  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.

276 comments