Hardware reuse and recycling

 I recently boosted a post about how some US school systems have come up against a problem with Chromebooks - the fact they fall off the supported hardware list after about five or six years.

This is a problem.

Often the hardware has more life left in it that the artificial cut off date, and while in the past I've used a chromebook well past its use by date, this is not something that you would want to do in a production environment where you need everything to be kept at (more or less) the same release level.

Now, you might think I would go all precious and point to how I turned a 10 year old refurbished machine into a decent little research workhorse, but I won't.

It's one thing for me to do this, it's another thing to do  this at scale and provide a supported environment, simply because to do it at scale would need technicians to do the installation and troubleshooting, some user training, and a little helpdesk team to support the user community. And that of course costs - human beings are incredibly expensive to employ compared with the other costs involved.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but to quote a former colleague 'yes, but you're you', ie I have the experience, expertise and technical skills to put together a solution that works for me.

Not everyone does so, nor should we expect them to.

What one of course needs is an easy to install, easy to maintain, Chromebook like environment with some user support behind it.

Given that most educational services have a set of preferred hardware this ought to be possible to deliver, but other than a few experiments in Latin America, such as Huayra, I'm damned if I can think of one ...

[update 04/08/2023]

One of the problems with the longterm support of Chromebooks is that often they use weird processors rather than the standard Intel range, which complicates the problem of updating them to an alternate operating system for long term support.

However, I've just learned of a new project, LaCros, that aims to allow you to install an updated browser on top of the old ChromeOS monolithic operating system and browser binary.

As the browser component is updated more frequently than the operating system on Chromebooks this potentially provides a way of running a more recent and secure browser on an older version of the underlying operating system.