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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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This sounds like there's a market for a Linux distro that behaves like ChromeOS and can be centrally managed.
The problem comes down to education institutions. I remember when we got Chromebooks in my highschool (8 years ago) admins forgot to turn of developer mode and half the school unenrolled the Chromebook managing to bypass all restrictions. This went on for half a year until one day our school needed to run a state exam (more for measure of schools performance not as a college entrance exam or anything).
The computerized testing program required deploying a specific chrome app accessible when chrome book is logged out (can't just download from chrome web store). When they tried to push the client since half of Chromebooks were unenrolled it failed. This required the school it to recall pretty much all chrome books to manually re enroll all of them and disable developer mode (prevents unenrolling and prevents sideloading Linux).
Problem is if older Chromebooks are used for Linux in an educational environment there would be nothing stopping a student from whipping up a bootable USB and dumping another distro (bypassing restrictions). I'm also not sure if there is a enrollment mode equivalent Linux (there may be but not sure).
At least that's my two cents (not a school it admin just a memory from the past 😉).
They could just disable booting from USB drives in the bios and password protect it. They could install something like Fedora Silverblue, or even customize the image used to include whatever modifications they want. Any changes they made to the image would be propagated through autoupdates. Kids wouldn't have root, so they couldn't forcibly install a different OS. Of course they could install flatpaks to their home directory, which is probably something administrators would want to prevent, but a knowledgeable student can always find ways to do what they want.
This of course requires schools/districts to hire people to manage that stuff, which could be a problem.
Good point. I wasn't sure if Chromebooks had a normal bios with password protect/option to disable USB boot for non chrom os operating systems.