Bonum Certa Men Certa

Wall Street Journal “Article” About “Expiring Chromebooks” is Highly Misleading. Put Them in Developer Mode and Run Anything!

Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.

The Wall Street Journal (Rupert Murdoch) recently ran an article to spread FUD about Chromebooks.



In this article, they claimed that all Chromebooks have a built-in expiration date and that schools were beside themselves over what to do about it.



Most Chromebooks retail for as little as $129, which no Windows PC in the price range will even work on, much less run well. Even if it did when you bought it, it’s less likely they would run five years later, when the Chromebook “expiration date” is said to happen.



You get an incredible amount of “mileage” out of a Chromebook for the price, and schools that buy these things in bulk don’t even pay the retail price for them.



Windows is technically, and functionally obsolete. It’s also gradually falling out of the common use and will be obsolete in that sense eventually too. (From 95% to 69% of the desktop market, and in a desktop market shrinking due to devices.)



Windows is bloated behind reasonableness even by the horrible “modern” standards of software bloat.



It hardly even ran on my 2016 Skylake i7 with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB nvme SSD and Iris Pro graphics, much less a ~$250 “education” computer which will come with a Celeron and 4 GB of RAM, and 128 GB of storage at best.



Just browsing around on Brave while I tried it out was painful. Even right-clicking a menu was less-than-performant on Windows 11.



Debian 12 with KDE runs so well on that computer that in the course of normal usage, I can barely tell you that it’s not my 11th Gen i7 with the graphics card that’s twice as fast.



Windows is so unbelievably bad it has the guts of three Web browsers baked into it, one of them Internet Explorer (which you can still trick into opening as a browser on the latest Windows 11 build).



Despite the rotting guts of three Web browsers, two of which aren’t even maintained and are not meant to be used (but do add security threats), as well as the Explorer shell of Windows 10 still present, but hidden by default, while the Windows 11 shell comes with ads, Microsoft recently announced that it can’t afford to maintain Wordpad.exe anymore, and it will be removed from a future release of Windows.



Wordpad may sound stupid, and it is, but using Office 365 and paying for it is the epitome of stupid behavior.



Don’t use Microsoft or Google Clown Office. Use LibreOffice.



Furthermore, (as I found in the Paul Thurrott article comments) Microsoft’s OOXML (docx, xlsx, etc.) formats are so poorly designed, that some users have passed the hint around that you can use Wordpad to fix them when they becomes so corrupt that not even Microsoft Office can, is “useful Windows knowledge”.



Instead of forcing users to rely on hacks like this with a program that is otherwise useless in the modern world, Microsoft should look into why Wordpad is the only thing that can fix their documents from Word in some cases.



So, Microsoft Windows is falling apart, and they have to resort to lots of “stealth advertising by FUD” for the competition.



Never mind that you have to pay twice what a Chromebook costs for a Windows PC that barely even runs at all, you’ll have to pay for the “Clown Office” too if you go that route.



On a Chromebook, you can just install “Linux” and then use Apt from the Debian environment to install LibreOffice. The icons for the Suite appear on your ChromeOS desktop and it works great and you don’t need to pay Microsoft anything!



When my spouse was in school (one that has been taken over by Microsoft toadies), they DEMANDED that I go get him a PC and pay full price for Microsoft Office.



The student “discount” was still an outrageous price. It would have cost me more just for MS Office than the entire Chromebook I put LibreOffice on using Debian in the container!



Of course Microsoft can pay WSJ to write these articles, because enough people gave them over $200 for some really terrible office programs and some money for Windows too.



Chromebooks can be used with current software well past five years.



It’s a bit of a process, but you can remove a screw and put them all in Developer Mode, do a bit of work to give it a “UEFI” payload (which won’t be the “real” firmware, just a decoy to get a PC operating system on the thing), and run any Linux operating system you want.



Including, on many models, “Chrome OS Flex”, which is designed to turn old x86 PCs and Macs into Chromebooks that can run a current operating system. Android Police wrote an article about it.



For its part, Google doesn’t guarantee it will work or stay working, but I also don’t think they’re trying to sabotage it.



Chrome OS Flex can do basically all the same things Chrome OS can do, including run the Linux container with Debian programs, so when Google “expires” your Chromebook, you can get away with more.



Hell, there are people (I’ve read about on Reddit.) who have flipped their old Acer C720 over and done this and are still using the current version of Chrome OS Flex on it.



That’s a really old Chromebook, so if that still works, imagine what else you can get away with.



So, reports of this alleged “drop dead date” have been highly exaggerated.



It’s more of a “Google doesn’t support this officially and you’re going to have to take measures to continue using it on your own.” date.



For some organizations, this may scare the IT guy and be a non-starter, but if you think about it, there are a lot of people running PCs in ways “unsupported” by the manufacturer.



Lenovo neither provides, nor has never provided any “support” for running my ThinkBook 15 Gen2 ITL with Linux, but here I sit 3 years in, typing this on Debian 12.



They never “supported” my Yoga 900 with Linux, and I had to fight them in court to make it happen and for users everywhere to be able to do the same thing, even if they didn’t know how to tear the computer apart and use an “SPI flasher tool” on the stupid system firmware.



I’ll keep fighting the bastards every time I get some hardware, because I’m three for three. You know what? I’m not Microsoft or Lenovo’s favorite person in the world.



They shouldn’t be mad at me. They should be mad at Microsoft for ruining their business and causing them to border on failing as a company with “Windows 11”.



They’ve spent “ink” and had Internet trolls belittle me and lie about me, but my position has been the winning one with three OEMs now.



But now you see that the true score is that Windows can barely work “out of the gate” on a computer twice the price. Much less in five years.



This is rumor control. Here are the facts.



Another fact is, you don’t have to run Chrome on ChromeOS.



You can ignore Chrome and never open it and use any browser for Linux or Android, including Firefox, SeaMonkey, Vivaldi, Opera, GNOME Web, and many more.



Yes, I collect some browsers. I do have GNOME Web in the Chromebook. It was installed through Flatpak, not Apt, because I didn’t want a mess of GNOME bits flying all over the system and an old version of the browser.



Ron Swanson: “I have a permit for this.”



This is just a piece of paper that says “I can do what I want.”



Ron Swanson: “Yes, this is a park, I’m the Director of the Parks Department.”

-Parks and Recreation

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