A tutorial and slight manifesto on reviving end-of-life Chromebooks. How to make them into autonomous servers, and why we need to rethink computing in the age of climate collapse.

Chromebooks came up a little after I worked for the big Garseholes as a translator typing monkey. I didn’t believe the hype anymore and never bought one. But this looks like a good option if you happen to have one sitting around.

  • @heiroblastEnglish
    1•9 months ago

    Love this. I’m a put-linux-on-everything tinkerer who’s made countless things work just by stripping off the junky OS that’s usually failing due to planned obsolescence – I still have a macbook from 2011 that stopped running MacOS in about 2017, but has been happily running linux ever since.

    I was really angry when I got ahold of a decent chromebook in 2019 and found I couldn’t put linux on it, due to deliberate design decisions made to lock the hardware into only using the [expletives] excuse for an OS that is ChromeOS. But it looks like I won the waiting-game, because I put that laptop away rather than throw it out, and last weekend I pulled it out, did some reading and found out that smart folks have now caught up to its little games, and it can run linux now. Exciting! it’ll be a great little energy-efficient server-machine once the upgrade is done. Chromebooks age like fine wine :D