[riversflow]

>There’s no reason schools or parents can’t hand kids unmanaged/unrestricted Chromebooks

Holy cow. Are you serious? Kids break stuff for fun.

This is basically a “You’re holding it wrong” argument. Schools are gonna have heavily managed chromebooks, because it’s the reality on the ground that they can hardly afford anything, much less insane IT support for every student. Like, kids are going to actively sabotage the software on their school equipment if they can as a way to avoid doing schoolwork. This was common when I was in high school over a decade ago, they solved it with Deep Freeze software and extremely restrictive Microsoft policies.

Google is the one with a wealth of IT and developer talent, not school systems. They are making the product, not the schools. Devs have to come from somewhere, and going out a limb here, I don’t think smartphones (the other computer that [low income] students are likely to have access to) provide an on ramp for developers, so it would be good if these chromebooks did.

[scheeseman486]

Virtually any Linux distro can be turned into a managed OS.

[westurner]

Something could manage access to and the run state of containers (just like APKs and other apps running without `ps -Z`) so that the state of the machine can be reset.

And then an instructor could specify policy that would affect which apps and containers run on the machines attached to the management domain (e.g. at test-taking time and also all of the times)

Comparing etckeeper and rpm-ostree's diffs of /etc lately

(where e.g. LVM or btrfs CoW snapshots would need eventual compaction)

[beanjuiceII]

I think you are greatly over simplifying it