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Comment by SamBam | Hacker News Reader

As someone who works in a school with Chromebooks, I love that web apps like this exist, especially if students will be able to export the files to a 3D printer. It greatly opens up the number of tools we can use to do fun things.

That said, also as a teacher and a parent, I worry that Chromebooks are making kids have no idea about the world of non-web-apps. (And file systems, etc. etc.)

I watch my kid create a poster: find an image online, copy & paste into an automatic background remover, c&p into an image editing program to remove the watermark, c&p into Canva for assembling with text etc.

Meanwhile I show her that I can do the whole thing on Pixelmator Pro (or Affinity or Photoshop) and she looks at me like I have three heads.

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Chromebooks need to die, we need to get back to native apps. Look with Windows we have msix, with Linux we have flatpack, etc .. Storage is cheap, and our devices are powerful. Let's use that power

It simplifies things for schools, because everything is easily managed, everything integrates with Google classroom, and the hardware is fungible, you can log into any one and have your files.

It doesn't train them how to use real computers, but that's not on the state standards so they don't care.

> It doesn't train them how to use real computers, but that's not on the state standards so they don't care.

Arguably, it really should be.

Google Classroom is the worst LMS I've ever used and the "log in from any machine and have your files" thing was solved by Active Directory decades ago...

The reasons schools ate them up os because they're cheap and were the most readily available laptops during a shortage. I really doubt much else was on anyone's mind.

I also have a few qualms with it:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

For some users, they're perfect (not all - schools etc need Win/Linux/Mac). I have family members who should just have a Chromebook as all they do is browse the internet - copy and paste is a stretch for them!

Let the kids make websites?!

I love web based software (minus the logins). This saves soooo much time in a teaching environment. Time that can me used for teaching ideas, approaches, rather than struggling with compatibility issues.

For CAD you can run Solvespace on a chromebook. I'm not sure I want to promote it for use below high school, as the geometry failures and their workarounds are probably too icky for younger users. I want more polish for kids.

Solvespace is hardly polished enough for general use, though. I can use it, but I constantly struggle against the way it handles sketches.

I think a set of problems where you intentionally create failures and then work through solving them would be quite interesting for anyone learning geometry, beyond a certain point. Understanding exactly why the failures are failures, what about the geometry or the computation makes them fail, would help build an intuition for geometry and topology itself.

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