were fine with that because shit should just work.

This was Apple's literal marketing campaign when they were trying to make Macs popular again

Before Chromebooks we had one aging computer lab that the entire school had to reserve and share. Kids never even learned to type. I was able to improve students typing ability before they hit High School.

Because we had Chromebooks (that I raised money for with fundraisers) my students were able to learn to use digital data logging of science experiments using probes, my students were able to learn to design websites, I was able to teach them programming basics using Scratch, I was able teach kids basic IT management since I created a team of kids to assist with tech problems students and teachers had with their technology. I taught them CAD with TinkerCAD, I taught them video editing, I taught them image editing, etc.

Chromebooks were amazing.

official native support for sideloading any Linux distro you please.

I thought you had to remove a write protect screw and flash a custom firmware.

Have they stopped that now?

The school doesn't let you do that. Because if you installed Linux you could install games, and then you might get distracted. Never mind the fact that YouTube is still completely available.

I looked into this back when I was in school and there was some weird workaround found by someone on reddit that essentially forced it to do a complete factory reset. I didn't want to get in trouble for doing that, and if I did that I wouldn't have been able to connect to the wifi anymore.

Do you mean like booting off Linux or installing it? I was looking at installing Linux on Chromebooks and apparently it really depends on the model. Some have a physical screw that you open up the laptop and unscrew to install Linux.

Probably windows 🤮

I think there were jailbreaks that could be done on device, but if I remember correctly this wasn’t one of them. I forget the exact year/iOS version. I wanna say I jailbroke 3 iOS versions in a row, and at that point new things had captured my interest. Eventually I found myself captivated with frontend development.

You can find my latest work at https://blorpblorp.xyz/, the obviously best client for Lemmy and soon PieFed.

My motivation was mostly to ditch Amazon, but in the process I discovered ko reader is both better than Amazon’s reader and does a really good job turning PDFs into readable books.

You don't need to have a dev environment in order to be considered "tech literate".

Just as a single example, an issue I've seen is that kids may not even understand what a file system is or how it works, because they're used to apps like Facebook or Google Drive which abstract away from the concept of a hard-drive, a User folder, file extensions, etc. Then they grow up putting photos on instagram, writing essays on Microsoft Word, and to them it's some unexplained internet magic. They never had first-hand experience with creating and modifying files on a local file system, and so they lack the understanding of what's going on behind the scenes.