10 years of updates for chromebooks, including current devices

[E-waste]

Summary

 

 A majority of chromebooks in 2024 were going to be "out of support", so the company of that brand extended support for two extra years, for a total of ten years of software support.  This is probably unlikely to be that this company is in any way concerned about electronic waste, but rather their public image.

It is annoying that there is zero mention of Linux for chromebooks or Lacros, Linux and chrome os.

 

Quotes

Quote

"All Chromebook platforms will now get regular automatic updates for 10 years," Google's blog post says. Numerous Chromebooks released in 2019 were about to expire next year. Now, no Chromebooks should be expiring within the next two years.

Quote

Google's announcement comes about three years after it announced that Chromebooks' extension of automatic update support from five years to eight.

 

At the time, 64 Chromebook models were scheduled to expire by the end of summer 2024.

 

My thoughts

Is it ok to give more than a few sentences...

 

I also do not appreciate the horrendous lack of true technical education, and Linux education as well.  I think it does our human race and the health of our planet a disservice, when even old 32-bit devices could be more than acceptable for home use, web browsing, videos and ever home lab / server use.  As you can tell, I could go on about this for as long as I am able to.

 

All old smartphones could have the storage chips forcibly erased, and a community developer effort could compile a Linux system for all arm processor models.  I really hope risc-v catches on to eliminate this issue of software compatibility between similar processor design.  I know it is not realistic to believe that anyone cares enough about this to recompile LineageOS for all possible android devices, and is incredibly unlikely to ever happen, but I'd like the idea of custom roms to not be viewed as a tossup between a hacked together experience vs having to uprade a device, replacing all hardware, as the only two ways to access updated software.  I was able unlock one of my android devices, so for as long as Android AOSP sources and LineageOS servers remain online, I will be able to compile new software for this single device.

 

I also do not like that Microsoft designed Windows 11 to suggest that hardware from 2018 and before as "unsupported", giving the idea that it may be required to upgrade your five year young computer for a reliable system.

 

Right-to-repair needs far more public pressure, and we all should try to keep any device we own for as long as humanly possible, even if it has poor performance, or screen cracks, or if the software has stopped getting updates and has annoying bugs, and is designed to not be changable by the user.  But we are way too spoiled.  We just gotta have a new device because of "security reasons" and we have let our fear of malware developers pressure our device choices and purchasing habits.  This has not only horrendous environnental harms, but continues the cycle of recurring work for enslaved mineral miners in the Congo in Africa.  During our societal changes in recent years, the poor Africans actually had to advocate for re-opening the mines, because apparently that is there only means of employment, isn't that wild?

 

We can stop this egregious human rights violation in both Africa and other areas such as South America and Asia.  We all can support a better future, and I don't want to keep waiting.  I want non-technical people and geeks alike to do our very best to extend device cycles, and support open-source, hardware like risc-v to have compatible software for an entire hardware design, vs recompiling for every minor change for hundreds or more likely thousands of devices, which limits changing software or compatible software.

 

It is happening slowly and begrudginly from brands, who are only doing the absolutely bare-minimum possible to minimize public complaints.  We have caused enough environmental and societal damange for the current and next four lifetimes.  Let's stop this disregard for quality of life and planet today, with our tech choices.

 

Sources

 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/google-extends-chromebook-support-from-8-years-to-10-after-heightened-backlash/

 

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/automatic-update-extension-chromebook/

[Quackers101]

so 10 years for this and 2 years for some, and 5-7 years for phones?

well that is very good? amazing? chromebooks are soo powerful.

[LAwLz]

I don't really understand the outrage. 

10 years of support for Chromebooks, which are typically really cheap laptops used in schools, sounds really good to me. I doubt any school would want to keep the same laptops for about 10 years. They are probably pretty destroyed after 3 or so years. 

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

I don't really understand the outrage. 

10 years of support for Chromebooks, which are typically really cheap laptops used in schools, sounds really good to me. I doubt any school would want to keep the same laptops for about 10 years. They are probably pretty destroyed after 3 or so years. 

The highschool I used to go to was still using Windows XP laptops with Celeron M and 512MB RAM in 2013...so 10 years of use isn't out of the question, not with modern low-end hardware and Chrome OS being lightweight.

[Arika]

Did you use this news story as a platform to get on your soap box to spout about linux, RISC-V and africa? the topics you're going into in the "my thoughts" are barely even loosely connected to the main article

[ItTakes2ToMango]

This extension of support is a direct result of the pressure from the Right to Repair movement. If they are only doing it for their public image, that's good because it specifically means we are successfully putting the pressure on them. That is a significant improvement over the prior situation of them not caring at all.

 

We take a step forward and you're outraged we didn't take an enormous leap

[E-waste]

50 minutes ago, ItTakes2ToMango said:

We take a step forward and you're outraged we didn't take an enormous leap

That's a great way to summarize my feelings on this.

 

I really do not believe that most people have seen the mining videos, I posted two in the off-topic section.

 

In addition, it's almost like "now" is the time we should be doing this, when 100% of all tech businesses for been aware of these human rights and environmental harms for well over a decade if not two, or possibly three.  And again, they are just slowly dragging their feet, as if against their will, because they seem as though the quality of our soil, air, water, and wellbeing of others does not affect their lives.  If this was happening in America it would be different, but since it isn't then let's just bury our heads in the sand and worry about it later?  Eventually this will have to be solved, and we already have all the ability.

 

We can already make batteries without cobalt.  It's already been done.  We will definitely have cobalt free batteries soon.

 

We can surely recycle gold silver and copper from previously produced equipment, and I'd imagine that's far better for our planet than digging more holes and displacing more land.

1 hour ago, Arika said:

Did you use this news story as a platform to get on your soap box to spout about linux, RISC-V and africa?

Yeah, what's the issue with that?  I posted a news story and discussed that I think we should make bigger improvements, in both education, and re-use of older tech.  It would also be great if we had more businesses pulling minerals like gold and copper out of electronics, that is the next green rush for sure.

 

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I doubt any school would want to keep the same laptops for about 10 years. They are probably pretty destroyed after 3 or so years.

What are you doing with a laptop that it is nearly unusable after three years?  If kept in a safe location, a laptop can be used for ten years. I have a laptop that has a cracked screen (many cracks) and other issues.  The screen has come off the hinges, but still tethered by some cable or something or another, but still works very well, and the non-replacable battery is still in great shape with over 90 minutes of runtime without the battery going below 30%.  99.9999% of people would trash the laptop because the screen doesn't hold itself up, and looks broken, and the screen is cracked in about five or six different places, and also, because of the screen being off the hinges (metal hinges at that) the sensor for sleeping the screen also doesn't work.

 

But the laptop is performing just as well as a new one and the only issues are with how it looks.  There's no real reason to replace the laptop, and I plan to keep it until the CPU stops working.

 

Also, @Quackers101 They don't need to be fast at all, which is how the raspberry pi got so popular.  CPU speed means almost nothing for simple tasks, and anything above about 200 Mhz, and no I'm not exaggerating, is perfectly usable for opening a web browser and inputting text into an email program.  The real slowdown in systems designed at the turn of the century is the storage and maybe the pata interface.  The memory is fast enough, and once the hard drive has finished transferring a program into memory, the CPU is usually in a near idle state.

 

This is exactly why I think we need more Linux education.  A CPU at 800 Mhz is not distinguishable from a CPU at 3.7 Ghz for small tasks.  It is about half or so the speed when starting a virtual machine, but once that's booted, you wouldn't be able to tell if your firewall is running slower, unless it's got packet inspection and a huge list of rules.

[ItTakes2ToMango]

21 minutes ago, E-waste said:

Yeah, what's the issue with that?  I posted a news story and discussed that I think we should make bigger improvements, in both education, and re-use of older tech.  It would also be great if we had more businesses pulling minerals like gold and copper out of electronics, that is the next green rush for sure.

 

I think that's exactly my issue with this post.

 

I agree with you. There are few here, if any, who don't believe that we should make improvements to education of tech or that e-waste isn't a big deal. That's a great post all on its own and I think you should still make it but you took a positive moment in our push for right to repair to complain about it. If you make your reactions negative towards a step forward, people are not going to want to follow you nor are the people who made these changes going to feel good about having made the step forward.

 

Even if you thought it was really important to give those opinions here, you could have better reinforced how this was a good step forward rather than slandering it before doing so.

 

 

[Quackers101]

6 hours ago, LAwLz said:

They are probably pretty destroyed after 3 or so years. 

more or less

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/21/23691840/us-pirg-education-fund-report-investigation-chromebook-churn

Quote

(not listed specs)
researchers found that nearly half of the replacement keyboards listed for Acer Chromebooks were out of stock online and that over a third cost “$89.99 or more, which is nearly half the cost of a typical $200 Chromebook

Quote

Acer supports our in-warranty customers with spare parts for a minimum of 4 years for our education accounts. Our spare parts availability was 95% within 24 hours of the order being placed

(also noted about chromebook's lack of repairability)

 

[Donut417]

9 hours ago, LAwLz said:

hey are probably pretty destroyed after 3 or so years. 

My brother in laws son I guess got pissed at school and punched his screen. 3 years or a really pissed off kid would do it.

 

5 hours ago, E-waste said:

We can surely recycle gold silver and copper from previously produced equipment, and I'd imagine that's far better for our planet than digging more holes and displacing more land.

Our county does hazardous waste disposal and you can bring things like batteries and computers and other hazardous items. But they only do it a few times a year. What we need is to have every community have a place to drop off things like electronics, free of charge. Where they can get it in to the hands of companies who can either repair those electronics or pull all the usable metals out of them.

 

Also we need to mandate that things be made with materials that can be recycled.

[Kisai]

30 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

My brother in laws son I guess got pissed at school and punched his screen. 3 years or a really pissed off kid would do it.

 

Our county does hazardous waste disposal and you can bring things like batteries and computers and other hazardous items. But they only do it a few times a year. What we need is to have every community have a place to drop off things like electronics, free of charge. Where they can get it in to the hands of companies who can either repair those electronics or pull all the usable metals out of them.

 

Also we need to mandate that things be made with materials that can be recycled.

I doubt few chromebooks are in a completely "usable" state after 3-4 years, if only because kids don't treat things with respect until they have to pay for it out of their pocket. Doesn't matter if it's an iphone, chromebook, game console, car, clothing, etc.

 

If google wanted to really make some positive headway into touting chromebooks, they would have standardized on a design that ANY PART from ANY MODEL is interchangeable with another, regardless of manufacturer. That's probably wishful thinking, but imagine just being able to swap screens, batteries, or keyboards because that's the only part that got damaged.

 

But having seen hundreds of laptops (not chromebooks) get disposed of, they are not, ever, engineered to last more than 2 years. Yes, you can make MOST last 10 years, but you have to compromise a few ways to do so.

- Removable NVMe SDD's (if they're soldered, then the entire PCB is trash)

- Removable RAM (if soldered*, entire PCB is trash)

- Removable/socketable GPU/CPU PCB (eg the internal connections are in the same place on all models, so heatsinks and fans all fit the same mounts and vents.)

- Removable Battery (with a durable connector, not a FPC connector)

- Keyboard connected by a durable connector (not a FPC connector)

Like of all the Dell laptops I've had to take apart or fix, it was far harder to fix something due to the amount of plastic layers in the chassis. So to replace a keyboard it often required weaving the FPC cable under and over metal and plastic. And the reason that happens is because without it, the keyboard would just sag when you type.

 

Structurally chromebooks are just built cheaply, and often make Dell look like a premium brand, when they're not.

 

*Soldering RAM saves the OEM a few pennies, and makes the PCB have to be discarded if there is a failure of the RAM, which isn't frequent, but  when a PCB contains pretty much every part, you're essentially discarding the entire laptop anyway.

 

At any rate, the horse has left the barn I feel, and any school districts still buying chromebooks, do not understand what they are buying into.

[LAwLz]

6 hours ago, E-waste said:

What are you doing with a laptop that it is nearly unusable after three years?  If kept in a safe location, a laptop can be used for ten years. 

I take care of my laptop. 

I'm talking about Chromebooks, which are as the article mentions mostly aimed at children in schools. 

They do not take care of them. 

 

These days even children 10 and below oftentimes gets laptops for school. 

 

They get thrown into backpacks which then gets thrown on the ground and about. Maybe they sit on them because they forgot they had it in their backpack.

Kids hit them because they get mad, or decide to shove a pen into the keyboard because they saw something weird and wanted to have it removed. They decide that they think it's a good idea to disassemble it and try and assemble it again, but fail miserably. I've seen countless of kids spill things over their laptops. 

When I saw at school we noticed that putting a magnet at the CRT screen made it look funny. We did that until it left a permanent mark on it, because we were teenagers and didn't consider the potential consequences of what we did. One of my classmates also decided to try and flip the voltage switch on the back of a PSU while a computer was on... It exploded and killed the PC. 

 

I as an adult know how to take care of my things. Children and teenagers who get handed a free laptop from school do in many cases not know how to take care of things, or they simply don't care, or they don't understand that what they are doing can damage the thing. 

[Donut417]

2 minutes ago, Kisai said:

At any rate, the horse has left the barn I feel, and any school districts still buying chromebooks, do not understand what they are buying into.

They buy Chromebooks because they are cheap and easy to setup. With things going online even in the classroom they need to ensure that the kids have a computer they can use.

[LAwLz]

4 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

They buy Chromebooks because they are cheap and easy to setup. With things going online even in the classroom they need to ensure that the kids have a computer they can use.

And they are also very easy to manage. 

Managing Windows is hard work and requires quite a lot of expensive and complex tools. Chromebooks can basically be managed by a somewhat tech-literate teacher on the side of their normal work. 

[E-waste]

I really appreciate the continuation of this discussion.  I think I'll have to compromise on the point of not being as negative as I am when also discussing a step towards delaying electronic waste, but my feeling will stay that companies, or organizations should think about electronic waste and the entire life cycle of a device before making a decision.

 

I don't have any control over that, but would like to see people who make those decisions for thousands of others to consider that aspect of the technology.

 

This has just been an issue that has gone on for possibly thirty years or more, and only now are things starting to improve.  I guess we'd all be in fantasy land if businesses decided to consider these aspects before they released a product and we all will be forced to wait.  This is why I share my opinion on keeping devices as long as they are still operational, even with security issues or minor bugs, to act as a compromise until companies change.

 

After three or more decades, I guess it grinds my gears that companies are not yet, literally fed up with their own bullshit, and keep happily eating it until the public complains.  I don't understand that in any way.  Money MUST not be so heavy of a motivation that you sell your soul to the devil.  That's not logical and it's a horrible trade, benefiting nobody.

 

On another note, I guess it is important to introduce technology to children, but let's please have paper worksheets like we have for centuries.  Nobody should have to stare at a screen and navigate a keyboard to complete a school assignment, especially not in lower grades.  I think that would already eliminate a large percentage of eventual electronic waste.

 

I had computers in school when I was young but that was for small educational programs that discussed weather and colors.  Not for any schoolwork.

 

Also, this would eliminate the need for people in school to keep up with their own computer, which they are clearly not at all able to respect or take care of.  It would also hopefully eliminate the need for schoolwork to be done on a computer at home as well, so no need to take care of something the schoolperson barely understands.

 

Google could do more, so much more, to promote unlocking full, regular Linux on devices, I know I already mentioned it, but it would be nice, with the way my smartphone says "powered by android" if the chromebooks said

 

"Powered by Linux, a free and open-source operating system" to help get the word Linux and also operating system, in front of the eyes of hundreds of millions, and that would also go a long way.  Just that little bit of text, at every bootup would do a great service to what helps make chromeOS possible.  It's not running BSD, Android or Windows, it's Linux.

 

It would also be jaw-dropping, if for out-of-support chromebooks, after their increased ten years of support is up, had a big message about how to click a button instead of entering cryptic commands, to expose full Linux.  Explain that it is the real base system for the computer, how it is secure, up-to-date, open-source and that it can be the continuously supported system for a chromebook once Google decides it's no longer profitable to support ten-year old hardware.

 

Now, I'd really be positive about that.

[Donut417]

4 minutes ago, E-waste said:

his is why I share my opinion on keeping devices as long as they are still operational, even with security issues or minor bugs, to act as a compromise until companies change.

When it comes to security I disagree. Too much ID theft and other bullshit happens in the US because of security related matters. Bugs on the other hand people can live with.

 

My big thing is when a device gets put out to pasture it needs to be recycled and all useful materials need to be remove. Further more make devices out of materials that can be recycled. It could go a long way to ensure that devices get x amount of years of support and are repairable.

 

The other big thing is changing the mind set that we need to upgrade mobile devices yearly. I never understood the trend. I dread having to change devices because I then have to screw around with all my accounts to ensure my Google Authenticater is working.

[igormp]

On 11/3/2023 at 7:43 PM, E-waste said:

I really hope risc-v catches on to eliminate this issue of software compatibility between similar processor design

Are you aware that RISC-V may make things even worse? Not only the set of peripherals will still be different (this is what currently happens among most ARM devices), but you'll also have entirely different µArches and custom extensions now, since the ISA license allows that instead of most people just going for off-the-shelf ARM-designed cores.

9 hours ago, E-waste said:

This is exactly why I think we need more Linux education

This has nothing to do with the useability of modern stuff, and I say that as a linux user and developer.

9 hours ago, E-waste said:

A CPU at 800 Mhz is not distinguishable from a CPU at 3.7 Ghz for small tasks. 

Except most people want to see videos and browse other social media. Unless you're vouching for a world with only plain text like 30 years ago, a 800MHz is pretty much useless for modern standards.

 

1 hour ago, E-waste said:

Google could do more, so much more, to promote unlocking full, regular Linux on devices, I know I already mentioned it, but it would be nice, with the way my smartphone says "powered by android" if the chromebooks said

Most chromebook are pretty easy to get regular linux going on, but as mentioned before, one of the reasons that schools go for chromebooks is the ease to manage them, something that your regular linux distro does not provide.

 

1 hour ago, E-waste said:

It would also be jaw-dropping, if for out-of-support chromebooks, after their increased ten years of support is up, had a big message about how to click a button instead of entering cryptic commands, to expose full Linux.  Explain that it is the real base system for the computer, how it is secure, up-to-date, open-source and that it can be the continuously supported system for a chromebook once Google decides it's no longer profitable to support ten-year old hardware.

And how should this be done? Should they automagically replace their system with a random linux distro? Or just kill the entire userland and leave the user with the raw kernel without anything to load as PID 1?

Also, who's going to support those devices after Google gives up on them? You?

Linux is maintained by the community, but if those devices are way too old and there's no developer interested, they'll just rot away until they're culled from the kernel.

[suicidalfranco]

meh

more outraged at corporations having a presence in children growth phase

 

 

[RejZoR]

This is a great way to reduce e-waste and have security at certain high level. Besides, that should be Google's end game. Their physical products are just vessels for their marketing and big data. Their profits don't depend on number of phones sold, but rather number of phones that use their apps and services that feed into their big data. It is very different concept than for example Apple where sales of devices in fact mean direct profits for the large part. Software and services are just a small chunk in their business. It's not tiny, but by no means such a large chunk as in Google's case.

[E-waste]

14 hours ago, igormp said:

Except most people want to see videos and browse other social media. Unless you're vouching for a world with only plain text like 30 years ago, a 800MHz is pretty much useless for modern standards.

No, it is not.  I have an old GT 430 that can play Grid 2 demo just fine.  The overclocked frequencies are near or slightly above 800 Mhz for the core and similar or a bit less for the memory.  Watching a video on youtube should be much less work for the system than Grid 2 on high settings.

 

I don't, but if you have a cpu with integrated graphics with a uefi setup that can downclock the cpu to 800 Mhz, as well as downclock memory (my memory is at 800 Mhz too) then please try your scenario and let me know how it performs.  I understand you'd be comparing very new integrated graphics chips, instead of what was available around 15+ years ago, but it might give you some idea.

[igormp]

52 minutes ago, E-waste said:

No, it is not.  I have an old GT 430 that can play Grid 2 demo just fine.  The overclocked frequencies are near or slightly above 800 Mhz for the core and similar or a bit less for the memory.

Comparing a 800MHz GPU to a 800MHz CPU makes no sense and is moving goalposts.

53 minutes ago, E-waste said:

Watching a video on youtube should be much less work for the system than Grid 2 on high settings.

It is different work, you can't compare those, watching a youtube video is entirely done either through hw acceleration (which your GPU lacks), or through software rendering, which is totally CPU based and may bring older GPUs to their knees depending on the codec.

55 minutes ago, E-waste said:

I don't, but if you have a cpu with integrated graphics with a uefi setup that can downclock the cpu to 800 Mhz, as well as downclock memory (my memory is at 800 Mhz too) then please try your scenario and let me know how it performs.  I understand you'd be comparing very new integrated graphics chips, instead of what was available around 15+ years ago, but it might give you some idea.

I use my desktop for work and even my current kinda overpowered setup is often slow for some of the tasks I do, so I don't see a point in limiting myself like so.

Anyhow, I did have issues with a misconfigured thermal protection in my laptop once that made it never go past 1GHz, and the experience was painful and it became pretty much unusable for daily tasks with a GUI.

[LAwLz]

8 hours ago, E-waste said:

No, it is not.  I have an old GT 430 that can play Grid 2 demo just fine.  The overclocked frequencies are near or slightly above 800 Mhz for the core and similar or a bit less for the memory.  Watching a video on youtube should be much less work for the system than Grid 2 on high settings.

 

I don't, but if you have a cpu with integrated graphics with a uefi setup that can downclock the cpu to 800 Mhz, as well as downclock memory (my memory is at 800 Mhz too) then please try your scenario and let me know how it performs.  I understand you'd be comparing very new integrated graphics chips, instead of what was available around 15+ years ago, but it might give you some idea.

You can't compare GPU core clocks vs CPU core clocks.

 

My GPU runs at 1500 MHz core clock and can do way more work than my CPU running at 5100 MHz.

It's mainly because my GPU has 5888 cores and my CPU has 14 cores. Although you can't compare core count that way either. 

Hell, you can't even compare CPU clocks vs CPU clocks (or cores) if you aren't comparing the same architecture.

 

 

But let me tell you, you're dead wrong when you say a 200MHz processor would be fine for things like web browsing. Maybe if you're using the LYNX web browser, but use anything slightly modern that supports let's say JavaScript, images, and video, then you will be having a really awful experience running it on a 200MHz processor.

A 200MHz GPU might be somewhat fine depending on what site you are visiting and which CPU you got, but the CPU itself will make things in a modern browser painfully slow if it runs at 200MHz, no matter the architecture.

 

 

I admire your dedication to reducing e-waste, but your constant attempts at trying to spin positive news into negative ones because "they aren't positive enough" and your ridiculous claims are starting to tick me off. Your posts are incoherent ramblings that are very loosely connected to one another. Like in this case an article about Google extending support for their Chromebooks for some reason was:

1) Presented as something bad (how the hell is extending support for a product bad?). I am not sure what your goal with this post was, but if I didn't know any better and read the article, I might have gotten mad at Google for extending the support because I thought they did something bad. That's the opposite of what you want people to do if you care about reducing e-waste. You are misleading people into not supporting your cause.

2) Turned into a rant about how we should adopt RISC-V for some reason, you brought up human rights violations in Africa and Asia, for some reason. It's really hard to follow and it doesn't even seem like you're interested in discussing the news you yourself decided to post. You just used it as an excuse to post a rather incoherent rant about several things you are mad about. 

 

If you're an industry shill trying to make people dislike reparability then you are doing a fairly good job, because you are making me dislike the right-to-repair movement. It's quite similar to how I agree with a lot of what the vegan movement says, but would never want to consider myself a part of the "vegan movement", because I don't want to risk getting associated with the people in the movement I truly despise. 

[williamcll]

The only good thing ChromeOS was good for was that it could run apks and deb without much fuss.

 

Limit that and there's no point in getting a chromebook. You might as well buy Rasberry Pis and get the kids to build their own computer.

[LAwLz]

4 hours ago, williamcll said:

The only good thing ChromeOS was good for was that it could run apks and deb without much fuss.

 

Limit that and there's no point in getting a chromebook. You might as well buy Rasberry Pis and get the kids to build their own computer.

As far as I know, you can still do both of those things just fine.

 

But I don't think a Raspberry Pi or "building their own computer" is a suitable alternative to Chromebooks. As I said earlier, and as the article says, the big market for Chromebooks is the education sector. They want cheap laptops that are easy to manage. School children aren't going to carry around tower PCs from class to class (or Raspberry Pis for that matter), nor would they be easy to manage.

For a home PC? You're probably right. But that's not really the intended target audience for these machines.

 

 

I would like to add that my mom loves her Chromebook though. Very easy to use, always up to date, runs all the stuff she wants. I doubt she would have been happy with a Raspberry Pi or some custom PC she had to build herself (or if I built it for her).

Sometimes, for some people, simple is better.

[E-waste]

On 11/5/2023 at 6:06 PM, LAwLz said:

Turned into a rant about how we should adopt RISC-V for some reason, you brought up human rights violations in Africa and Asia, for some reason. It's really hard to follow and it doesn't even seem like you're interested in discussing the news you yourself decided to post. You just used it as an excuse to post a rather incoherent rant about several things you are mad about.

The risc-v argument is in regard to ARM and each device needing specific compilation, for slight differences.  It is my limited understanding based on tech podcasts like the Destination Linux / Hardware Addicts, that RISC-V will help solve this issue and make it easier for operating systems to support various cpu models, without specific compilations per model.  That would significantly improve the ease of support of Android and custom software like LineageOS or stock AOSP across various devices.

 

My ramblings about the human aspect of it are to highlight or explain at least 50% of why I care about e-waste, with the other 50% being the rock we live on.

 

I think Google can do more, by explaining that a chromebook is just open-source Linux underneath, and also is compatible with the Google Chrome browser.  This would completely eliminate ALL software support timelines for any chromebook model.  I'm sure there is a way to lockdown Linux and prevent outside app installation, especially with a password enabled, that would probably be enough to keep the system functioning.  Without Google explaining that the Linux system can be fully exposed, and making it easy to do so, only ensures that in about two years, a majority of chromebook models will be seen as "out of support" or insecure, unpatched etc.  I'd be much more appreciative of stronger measures to eliminate this issue.