Software ‘death dates’ are sending schools’ Chromebooks to the recycling bin

Schools need the "indestructible" nature of Chrome OS where the OS very rarely breaks and even in that case you can factory reset and the student logs in and everything syncs so nothing is lost. No mainstream Linux distro works that way.

The most important thing that I've learned from Stallman is that "craft a story - don't worry how convoluted it might appear - where corporations take actions in order to benefit themselves at the cost of everyone else" is a good heuristic to predict the future in a capitalistic society.

To be clear, this isn't criticism of capitalism. Capitalism has good things and bad things, and I have faith that we can keep the good things and mitigate the bad things. Instead the point of my comment is to highlight how some times our intuition starts moving in the right direction but we stop it because "come on that's too far fetched, they'd never do that".

Yes, of course Stallman was right.

Google just says they won’t be providing software updates at a certain point. So the devices won’t get security patches, new browser features, updated root certificates, etc.

Googenheimer

No, they couldn't have

I have an old Acer C720 that's been happily running Linux for about a decade now. Very under powered (2 gb ram model) so I have to keep the distro lightweight. Bought it refurb for $150 -- what a great deal that was!

I like it enough that I've looked into a newer chromebook with a bit more RAM, and I was disappointed to learn that most of the newer models apparently can't be rooted like this.