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by benplumley 1055 days ago
It's a school - write or find a comprehensive set of instructions (for the happy path), give each student a chromebook and a blank USB, and have them do it. You get usable laptops and the students learn an important life skill - not necessarily that they memorise the instructions for next time, but that they learn what's possible.
4 comments

School Chromebooks are centrally managed via MDM software [1]. Getting students to jailbreak and install Linux is a non-starter. Schools lock these devices down right to the hilt. There’s no way parents would put up with their kids having an unrestricted laptop provided by the school.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management

None of these K-12 schools or teachers are going to pay for 30+ USB drives for students.
I used to manage laptops (both student Chromebooks and teacher Windows laptops) at a school, and I wouldn't even trust the teachers to be able to do this, much less students and parents.
> You get usable laptops

[citation needed]; how many bricks can you expect from having middle-schoolers monkey around with low-level firmware stuff?