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Comment by bnebxv | Hacker News Reader

The teachers have not learned their lesson. They continue to petition a corporation instead of taking matters in their own hands.

If they wanted budget laptops, they could have bought used ones for $50 on Ebay and installed Debian. But no, they wanted some hipster hardware from an advertising company.

The petition sets a bad example for students. They learn early on that they are serfs to large corporations, who sometimes graciously react to petitions. Later they might learn that Google's only working support forum is HN ...

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I'm a teacher.

I've spent a lot of time out of contract installing Debian on old laptops. It was a huge time sink.

But if I were paid for my labor, it wouldn't have been the cheap way at all. I think your plan assumes that a bunch of people will do the work for free.

I also have a lot of domain expertise: more than almost anyone in my role.

they could have bought used ones for $50 on Ebay and installed Debian.

Would you care to estimate how long it would take to source even 100 working $50 laptops, install Debian on all of them, and make sure they all actually work (where "work" includes having enough battery to get through a school day)?

Plus even then you wouldn't actually get away from Google since the school probably uses gmail, Google classroom, Google Docs etc.

> Would you care to estimate how long it would take to source even 100 working $50 laptops

Simply buy 100 chromebooks from 2017 that a school district is trashing because they aren't receiving security updates any more.

If those Chromebooks are same model, install and configure Debian, newest browser, etc once. Then use dd to backup internal harddrive disk image, and restore to other chromebooks. Change UUID, hostname etc with script.

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/usbharddrive/debian.img bs=20M conv=sync status=progress

https://github.com/xet7/chromebook

Yes, because teachers are known as a well paid class of people who have loads of free time on their hands, and for who the overhead of sourcing laptops through eBay and setting up operating systems and integration with other systems from scratch is an appropriate additional workload.

In some European countries teachers are extremely well paid and have at least 2.5 months paid vacation.

The vacation seems similar in the U.S., I don't know the payments.

It students really need laptops (big if ..), the installation should happen in class. If installation cannot happen in class, the laptops are toys anyway and aren't needed. Better teach maths.

Don't know if it's paid vacation, but part of the monthly salary is reserved to pay out next years vacation

> the installation should happen in class

Class time is far too valuable for this kind of nonsense.

At least in Poland even during vacation they are required to be at school for administrative reasons. Doing nothing, but still forced to be there.

In the US, teachers are underpaid for what they do (47-69K across the whole US, COL varies greatly), pay for many supplies out of their own pocket, and do not receive salary during the vacation months, so they often take summer jobs. When not teaching classes, they are also expected to use their "free" time creating classroom plans, grading papers, coaching homework, and appeasing parents in every way.

There's nothing stopping them from installing Debian on these Chromebooks.

It is monotonous work having to remove the Write-Protect screw and many other manual steps before the process can be automated.

Teachers don't have the time for that for a fleet of chromebooks.

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