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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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So the argument is that because Chromebooks just work and don't need troubleshooting unlike windows so this is Googles fault
OK
A certain group of Boomer-brains are heavily invested in the idea that Millennials are the only generation that knows how to use computers.
So we've been seeing a lot of "blame the X for the Y" agitprop that's increasingly divorced from reality. It's just the next generation of outrage porn, tailored towards the current generation of 40 year olds.
FOX News ran the same bullshit content for GenXers and Boomers.
They don't need to know how computers work if Chromebooks are the only thing in existence.
They also don't need to know how to deal with python dependencies if they can pace their code into AI and say why isn't tkinter working?
Craftsmrn said the same thing about the industrial revolution.
You know how you know even less about computers? When you cannot afford one at all
That's why they only know what Chromebook offers, they have them in school.
My kid's school doesn't have any kind of computer instruction, no computer lab, it's all Chromebooks.
Is it your genuine belief that your schools would have computer instruction and big easily accessible labs if not for Chromebooks?
I remember "teach kids computers" as an educational panacea during the 80s/90s. It made Micheal Dell very rich, but often at the expense of the biology, chemistry, and physics lab programs. "Nobody knows how to use a blowtorch / dissect an animal / build an engine anymore" was a refrain I heard all the through my high school years.
Has eliminating computer labs brought back the old 70s era Space Race science programs? Or are we still just boiling away ever ounce of the public system that costs money (except athletics, of course)?
That's honestly technology in a nutshell. Technological development leads to further abstraction, leading to less low level knowledge. It's always been this way. Is AI an abstraction step too far, or are we just the next generation of old man yelling at cloud?
AI has value but first a reality check. Most of the time it produces code which doesn't work and even if it did is usually of terrible quality, inconsistent style, missing checks, security etc. That's because there is no "thinking" in AI, it's a crank handle using training and some rng to shit out an answer.
If you know what you're doing it can still be a useful tool. I use it a lot but only after carefully reading what it says and understanding the many times it is wrong.
If you don't know how to program everything might look fine. Except when it crashes, or fails on corner cases, or follows bad practice, or drags in bloated 3rd party libs, or runs out of memory on large datasets or whatever. So don't trust anybody who blindly uses it or claims to be a "vibe" programmer since it amounts to admission of an incompetence.
No, the argument is that Chromebooks are so limited in what they can offer that kids never learned to do anything out of using the chrome browser.
Turns out you don't need to worry about troubleshooting something if you just remove that functionality lol
Most Chromebooks offered Linux on them. Even Linus Torvalds used a Chromebook when travelling to develop via it. Presumably because he was sick to death of "troubleshooting" when he had other, better things to do. And presumably schools and teachers also have better things to do than deal with bs like conflicting packages, missing drivers, viruses or whatever on every kid's device.
You are correct that most chromebooks can have Linux installed on them.
I don't think that's relevant in a discussion about Chromebooks in a school setting - were schools encouraging their students to install Linux?
Doesn't matter if they encourage it or, not, the option is there. So if kids want to mess around, compile stuff, run Linux games they can totally do it. The main purpose of the laptop however would be to do work, save / submit stuff to the cloud, run all day and be cheap so if it gets stolen or broken it's less expense to replace. I think in that role the Chromebook is the best solution anyone came up with. And there were a long line of contenders.
Is the option actually there, as in it's allowed by school policy? Would you be able to show an example confirming this?
I highly doubt a school IT department would be okay with this. The very post were discussing asserts that it was marketed to schools as something that can be locked down.
I'd also argue that even if it was allowed, whether or not it was encouraged undoubtedly matters.
These are kids we're talking about, not engineers. Additionally, were discussing technical competence at the generational level, so we'd have to rule out outliers, which I'd handily believe "kids who installed linux on their school Chromebooks" would fall under.
I don't have my Chromebook to hand but I believe the setting is in the Prefs. When you set up Linux it's a virtualized Debian that you can pretty much do anything with but it can't mess with ChromeOS outside. Not all Chromebooks support it since it's space / CPU dependent but if it does then it's Linux. I was even running graphical apps since the screen is a Wayland server.
I don't....think that answered my question?
Would this be against school policy? Are there examples to confirm this?
All Chromebooks ARE Linux. ChromeOS is a Linux based operating system. Whether or not you can get to the lower level is a different discussion. I had one of the first Chromebooks, you have always been able to root them and do what you want with them.