from Hacker News

Chromebook expiration date, repair issues 'bad for people and planet'

by cnst on 4/19/23, 7:26 PM with 10 comments

• by deadlyllama on 4/19/23, 8:30 PM

  I made the mistake of buying one of the early ARM chromebooks (Samsung 13"). Great little machine. Hardware still OK.

  But - Google themselves don't support Chrome that old. Google docs doesn't function correctly. Performance wise, it's fine, but the I bar showing the cursor location is in the wrong place.

  It's ARM, and old ARM, so the only distro producing images is Postmarket OS. And those images can't drive the internal display properly.

  Once bitten, back to x86 for future laptops. I'd consider something like the Pinebook that had Linux support from the beginning, but not something that didn't support normal Linux out of the box.

• by eklitzke on 4/19/23, 8:10 PM

  The update at the bottom of the article points out that new Chromebooks (released since 2020) are supported for 8 years, which is pretty close to the 10 years requested, and longer than most other devices.

• by uuuuuu on 4/19/23, 10:34 PM

  My chromebook together with crouton was excellent until Google obsoleted it. I'll never buy another one.

• by hgsgm on 4/19/23, 8:10 PM

  Can expired Chromebooks run Windows or Linux?