Colorado districts built up a supply of Chromebooks. Some are nearing their end | Hacker News Reader

Colorado districts built up a supply of Chromebooks. Some are nearing their end

coloradosun.com

20 pointslalunamel25 comments

The end-of-life problem seems like it could be solved, depending on the specific model.

Many Chromebooks can have coreboot installed (https://mrchromebox.tech/), turning them into regular PCs.

And since Google bought Neverware, a regular PC can be turned into a Chromebook by installing ChromeOS Flex.

.... or linux machines. Have an old Chromebook with Gallium OS installed on it and it's a fantastic little machine!

GalliumOS is great but sadly it's no longer maintained. I think you can get most of the same benefits with a vanilla distro, but you have to be willing to do the tweaking yourself.

I installed Arch on a CB3-111 last week, and it seems to work fine. I will probably make it swap to zram, and see if I can install a better touchpad driver, but the other limitations aren't things I can fix, most importantly:

- only 4GB RAM

- no meta (windows) key, so I'm using alt as the meta key for i3

- function keys are labelled as media keys, so I have to remember which one is F1

But neither GalliumOS nor Arch are a practical solutions for schools today, unless there's an easy way to lock them down and have central management?

There's something core to this discussion that I feel like everyone misses. Yes, kids annihilate computers. Yes, Chromebooks have an expiration date that's pretty arbitrary. Yes, Chromebooks generally have lower end hardware that doesn't last as long. Yes, making them last longer could mean you cycle through 8,000 Chromebooks in 4 years instead of 16,000.

My question is, do we really need 1:1 programs for kids? I absolutely think it's important to have computer skills, but I think that's more of an issue of class offerings rather than available tech. I'm 30 now, so well removed from when I went to school, but the amount of schools offering comp-sci related classes is embarrassingly low. Wouldn't those classes in labs with proper equipment provide better computer skills than a Chromebook?

And yeah, this is ignoring benefits that Chromebooks have like potential to a learning environment at home. I've worked in schools in various IT positions and I still just can't see the justification in having one laptop per child, especially if it's a Chromebook.

I'm a high schooler and I can say I need a chromebook/personal device for almost every one of my classes. Everything is digital and embeded into the Google ecosystem. A good 95% of writing is done on Google Docs, slideshows are created on Google Slides, and then this work is turned in on Google Classroom.

While yes, computer labs with traditional desktop PCs would be more economically feasible, they simply aren't possible for public schools (at least the one I go to) today.

The immediate rebuttal I can think of is of course you need a Chromebook; your school is now vendor locked to Google's platform. They did this by offering deep discounts to their cloud offerings.

The point about writing is a good one that resonates with me. I grew up in the age where typewriters were dead, we would outline on paper, and then do drafts/final revisions in the computer lab. I can absolutely see why going straight to digital removes a lot of inefficiency... but I'm just still not convinced it couldn't be handled by shared machines. Having robust dedicated machines, even still in the form of a laptop, could be part of the classroom.

I think the big issue is whether you give all the kids a laptop or not. If you don't, some of the kids won't have a computer at home. How are they working on, say, a writing project, then? Only at school?

The well-off, computer-savvy parents will buy their kids a laptop and make sure you can log into the school system so that they get the same working environment at home, whether it's Google Classroom or anything else. That paper you started in class, show it to your parents, and keep working on it at home. It seems like a huge advantage if some kids can't do that.

Once you're giving all the kids a laptop, it doesn't really matter whether it's a Chromebook, it's just the cheapest way to do it, and it's good enough.

I think that writing projects should be done in school while students have access to their educational resources, yes. This is purely my own experience so there's a huge grain of salt, but I have to believe that learning how to compose an essay should be iterative with the educator instead of being reactionary. The concept of writing a paper and handing it in for a grade only to be told you haven't met the criteria is wild to me. I can't remember any good paper I wrote that I actually wrote at home. Most of the time it was in class with the ability to ask the teacher questions.

There's been a big push to replace pen and paper with computers in school. To the extent that one school here that taught their students to write with pen first got reprimanded by the authorities and had to introduce computers earlier. Since you replace both books and pens with a computer, it kinda makes sense from that perspective that every student has their own computer.

Ironically many people still seem to be poor at comp-sci. Chrome and iPhone apps teach you to swipe and push buttons, not how computers or traditional software actually works.

From this parent's point of view, using laptops in school doesn't have much to do with computer science. My kids in elementary school use their Chromebooks for all homework. It seems very good for their computer skills. Word processing to write papers, learning to type, learning to use the mouse, using learning applications, using the internet to do research, and creating presentations.

When you say "proper equipment", well, proper equipment for a professional software engineer is often just a Macbook. How does that differ from a Chromebook? Okay, they can't run Xcode on a Chromebook, but a 4th grader isn't going to be learning that anyway.

The main thing for this generation is that so many of them are native touch screen users. They are used to iPads and iPhones and get very good at understanding those UIs. Which is great, but they will also need to learn how to use the keyboard+mouse+windows UI. Chromebooks seem great at that.

I agree for things like writing papers having access to a computer for research and word proccessing is a net positive, but I still believe that this is better handled by shared equipment contained within the classroom or lab. I may be a bit biased as I'm still not convinced that homework actually provides a ton of benefit, and I'm even more not convinced that homework should require a computer to be completed.

However, to further your first point even more, having one laptop per student is a great way to bring computers into the home of those that might not be fortunate enough to purchase them. In the school district I worked for (very rural Wisconsin) we were able to secure hotspots for households that couldn't afford a broadband internet service. However, even though I've been out of the education sector for a number of years I haven't seen a real uptick in computing skills so I wonder how effective these devices actually are.

I have nephews that entered the system about the time I started in the education sector (and actually worked in their district), but I can't confidently say their skills match or exceed the average student from the era of mid 2000's labs. Simply put without sounding like an old man, I'm questioning whether constant exposure to tech is replacing quality education about it.

By "proper equipment" I mean traditional laptops/desktops that are spec'd to be shared by multiple people and have quality components, or even repairable components so we don't end up with these mountains of e-waste.

Given the meager hardware requirements for ChromeOS why would any hardware devices need to be cut off from updates at all?

Google…

Chromebooks reach their “death date” when they are no longer capable of receiving operating system updates. Replacing them straps district budgets and harms the environment.

This sounds weird: "DPS sends its outdated Chromebooks to an electronics recycling vendor"

Why would the recycler be a 'vendor'? Is the district sending them laptops and paying them?

I'd have thought competition would mean the winning bid would be offering to pay the district something (even if only $20 per device) rather than requiring payment.

Colorado's local governments have a surprising amount of corruption just underneath the surface. Kickback schemes are common.

Commercial quantity electronics recycling has a cost component because it would not be economical otherwise to process the waste stream. This is not uncommon at all, to have a vendor you pay to recycle your e-waste. This is not the same business as recycling scrap steel, aluminum, or other materials.

https://info.mayeralloys.com/ewaste-blog/why-is-there-a-recy...

I understand the idea in principle: there are potential costs for data protection and environmental safety.

But in this particular case:

1. The laptops are being disposed of not because they have physical faults, but because their software is out of date. So there are no toxic materials to be disposed of.

2. These laptops were used by children, for school work. They don't contain state or commercial secrets, so the hard drives don't need to be shredded.

3. Even if there are secrets on the laptops, it's sufficient to do a single-pass erase before install ChromeOS Flex.

I'm really curious: if someone were to give you 1000 4-year-old Chromebooks, of which 200 had physical faults and the remainder had only software issues, how much you would spend (on labor for re-imaging and physical cleaning, and on processing waste materials) vs. how much you'd recover by selling the laptops on ebay.

Okay, so lets say you were going to avoid e-waste recycling because of the points you mentioned. You will need to do the following:

1. Get approval by way of an exception in the process to sell any devices still functional while still processing non functional devices through an e-waste vendor.

2. Paying someone per hour to wipe the devices to ensure no school or children's data remains, and confirming this has been done (otherwise, reputational and data loss risk).

3. Paying someone per hour to facilitate selling these devices second hand.

Keep in mind labor shortages currently across the country, and why it is cheaper to write a check, ship these devices to a shredder at the e-waste recycler, and get a certificate of destruction back that no one is going to harass you about. Colorado minimum wage is $13.65. It is ~$400 to process one ton of e-waste.

I understand that it makes sense to outsource this work, rather than doing it in-house. I wasn't suggesting the district do it in-house.

What I don't understand is: why is the market-clearing price for this service positive, instead of negative?

I wonder how much net profit the recyclers make, per ton.

Wait, the computer has a built in date where it stops updating? It's not a matter of Google dropping support, it's literally the laptop pulling an HP and saying you have to buy a new one despite it being in perfect working order?

Install linux

Does ChromiumOS exist in the same way Chromium does? Can these devices switch to community support?

(Tragically) Colorado's school districts definitely do not have the manpower, funding, or will to handle linux tech support for a bunch of teenagers. They can barely stay open 5 days a week

This seems like very poor planning.

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