chrome has taken the golden perch of educational institutions.
That is to say, many schools are standardizing on chromebooks because:
1) Durable: No moving parts. NO, NOT EVEN A FAN. (the most fragile part is the display. You can drop it lots of times, and it will be fine.)
2) Absurd battery life. 8hrs active use on a single charge.
3) Absurdly cheap. Often under 200$ per system, retail.
4) Cloud based storage means all student data is in a central location, agnostic of device used to access it.
Now, Microsoft wants in on that action. They are trying to make a competing solution to the chromebook, in the typical MS fashion. (Including creating inferior cloud infrastructure.)
Personally, I consider the first 3 things above to be very attractive, but don't give two shakes about the last one. Cloud storage can go fuck itself. I like to own my own data.
That said, the storage inside chromebooks and these new "cloud books" is not upgradable. It is crippled at 16gb or 32gb of space, depending on model, on average. That is barely enough for an operating system these days, let alone user data. The device makers *KNOW* this, and use the lack of storage as a second foil to herd you into their cloud ecosystems. Again, screw that noise. My data belongs to ME, not some megacorp who thinks they know better than I on how to manage my files.
Hence, the need to abuse the SDCard slot. My Samsung Chromebook 3 (Celes) has a microSD card slot that is easily accessible, but easy to ignore at the same time. Perfect for putting a very large microsd card into, and mounting as /home after installing MrChromebox, and getting legacy boot support. The "Cloud Books" will likely need similar bastardry to be seriously used. The problem is that SDCards are not really made for aggressive, or persistent write operations. They wear out fast if you do that. Linux is the ideal OS to use here, because you can use zram backed swap to avoid ever writing to either the eMMC based SSD inside, OR to the microSD slot for things like swapfile use. Windows? Not so much. Additionally, it is painlessly easy to mount the SDCard slot as /home with linux, and things just work as you want. Again, not so with Windows. (You CAN use junctions, softlinks, and other tricks to get the system to use the storage-- but many MANY things will break because of how moronic the MS developers are, and how they blatantly assume that all system files need to be in %system_root%/Program Files, and that hardlinks in this folder are a jolly good idea, and that it must always be on the main system volume. There ARE ways to address all the problems, but it quickly becomes a lesson in pain avoidance to just use the OS that is better suited to this kind of use case, and install WINE for all that windows software you might need on your underpowered portable.)
Just again, while Linux does this much better than Windows does, it still needs a little helping hand, because the 3rd party app developers (Browser makers, et al) all stupidly assume that you will have no problems shitting files all over the drive, incessantly, and continually. Thankfully, Linux has an easy to set up mechanism to address this-- tmpfs. That catches these writes if you put appropriate tmpfs mounts at all the places these pieces of software want to shit temporary files, saving your media. This is easy to have the system do for you on every boot, by adding the needed entries to /etc/fstab.
I just wish I had considered how aggressive writing the browser cache actually was. 50mb of crap in just a few moments of browsing is just too much. 20mb folders is most certainly access.
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Topic: The Generic Computer Advice Thread (Read 573632 times)