Also, I love Chrome OS for my kids laptops because I don't have to worry about viruses or malware. In the case, I purposefully want a less feature rich OS.
She's old and tends to believe anything a computer tells her, from "YOU HAVE A VIRUS CLICK HERE TO REMOVE!!!!" to "Click here to claim your prize money!", so her Windows box was basically enough of a fetid cesspool of disease to approach supervillain powers on its own.
It's not your threat model but it's someone's threat model and a chromebook does that better than anyone else, and your mom can do it.
Doesn't matter, you've protected your clients, that's what matters.
The worst case scenario is they seize it and prevent entry, which can happen with a blank or non-blank machine. Better it happens with a blank one.
> They would probably make you log in and sync before they let you enter the country.
This would be where you just don't enter the country. In the other scenario, you don't get in and they get to keep the machine anyway.
You can have a second account that is empty that you log into and isn't connected to anything.
My mom can still do both of those.
Now you can even use an alternate Android or Linux browser instead of Chrome.
It's a great OS too to give your parents who only need it for web browsing. Less maintenance and tech support.
This is how I use my Chromebook: any important configuration gets checked into Git. Granted, I don’t use it as my primary computer, but it does decently well as a device I can carry with me and wipe when necessary.
30 minutes to restore the same environment or 1 day to install something totally new and learn about it. Probably the latter.
To me, that is one of the single largest value adds of being in the Google ecosystem on this one- peace of mind.
I think my last install was about five minutes. SSD drives are surprisingly fast. The older laptop surely took a lot longer than that.
But, my /home partition was not touched, only the root partition was formatted. Don't tell me this was not allowed in your mind experiment.