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

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 85 points 1 year ago (38 children)

Reviving Chromebooks with Ubuntu: Autonomous Servers, Planned Obsolescence, and Permacomputing

[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 year ago (31 children)

That's what they should be doing, but it isn't what they're going to do, unfortunately.

Kimathi Bradford, a 16-year-old Oakland tech repair intern, has looked into whether there was a way to replace the outdated Chromebook software with a non-Google brand, but it ended up being a lot of work, Kimathi said, and the open-source replacement wasn’t up to par. “It’s like the Fritos of software,” he said. “No one really wants to use it.”

Now, I'm not sure if what they tried was Linux, but I wouldn't be too surprised. The younger generations grew up with smartphones; I feel as though operating systems will become more streamlined and opaque as time goes on. I suspect we'll have to contend with the phonification of mainstream computing in the coming years.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I've heard of CS majors coming in these days not knowing what a filesystem is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

so they think that reformatting is wiping the drive clean instead of recreating ntfs/exfat metadata files

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