> Flies in the face of many functional Chromebooks/Chromeboxens losing support
On these old hardware you can install Linux or even cloudready. Are you expecting support forever?
BTW even latest Lubuntu needs 4GB RAM... Sure you can use minimal window manager like awesome, but not the average joe!
That being said, most average users aren't gonna care about e-waste anyways, and are gonna buy a new computer ever couple of years, so for them this is a non-issue.
It's the browser, or rather the stuff that runs in it, that bogs down old laptops. The >1 second delay to switch folders in Gmail, for example, or the sluggish loading of video thumbnails in Youtube.
The proposition of installing Linux on these machines once they're EOL flies in the face of the reasons most users buy them, and won't at all address the core issue.
I mean... maybe? Why not? At worst, drop to a second tier of support where firmware might not get updated and new features that actually need new hardware don't work, but why should chromebook hardware stop working any more than any other PC? Most of my machines are 5-10 year old machines that Linux happily supports; why should Chrome OS - built on top of Linux - support any less?
I have a Windows laptop from 2010 still working fine, and a lot of Linux enthusiasts also say the same thing. Six years is pathethic for laptop support. Fortunately Google has realised this, but their insistence on not applying this on existing machines is hypocritical.
With a Linux base, it seems like releasing the drivers to mainline and supplying browser updates ought to take care of that. I don't really understand what else would need to go into that so maybe I'm missing something but especially for x86 boxes it should be pretty simple.
Further, if your hardware product requires never-ending software updates just to keep it working, perhaps you should invest in writing less crappy software to begin with.
How about as long as Microsoft? Or Red Hat? Why the hell not?
Actually yes. The standard is ten years from when the version is released, compared to Google's six. RHEL 7 (for example) was released in 2014 requiring 2GB, so people could indeed still have RHEL on such a system with two years of support left to go.
> RHEL is also frozen
Untrue. It doesn't move fast, to be sure, but it does get updated. Source: I used to be in the RHEL team.
> And BTW, are you willing to pay > $200 per year for chromeOS
I paid Google $1600 for the machine itself. The OS was bundled with the machine. It worked out to more than $200 per year. Please do some more research before cross-examining others - or, since the guidelines preclude that, just don't.