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Re: [LUG] Chromebooks

 

On Sun Sep 27, 2020 at 12:22 PM BST, Brad Rogers wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Sep 2020 11:41:07 +0100
> Hello Ciarán,
> If they're anything like Apple in this regard,(most likely) they'll
> start
> making the OS run excessively slow on older devices in a bid to force
> user to buy newer hardware.

The biggest problem was actually that they stopped providing updates at all for 
older machines, which rendered the web browser component totally useless and 
insecure. From what I've read, they are halting this practice and separating the 
browser component from the operating system, but that still means that at some point 
your OS will stop receiving any updates at all.

The web itself gettingi heavier is generally what causes these devices to slow down 
since their actual OS is so light (it's just Gentoo, after all). Wouldst that the 
web were a more efficient beast...

> An example; Updates to my daughter's ipod rendered it useless after a
> couple of years. So we bought new hardware - not from Apple. Problem
> solved.

Yeah, from my (admittedly limited) experience of both Google and Apple I have found 
the best solution to be to ditch them entirely make use of repairable, generic 
hardware with a robust operating system on it. This combination is getting more and 
more rare with time unfortunately.

> As for the offline software issue - chromebook; it's google - they want
> all your data. It's what they do.

This is one part of it. The other is just that it's designed to be an always-online 
machine. Even if it were made by a free software vendor such a device is very 
limited. The fact of the matter is we do not live in an always-online world yet (and 
hopefully never will).

Ciarán

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