I have an 8 year old iPad that can still use Amazon video and can still run Netflix, and google drops support for these computers as early as 3 years. I’m not an Apple fanboy but that is absolutely ridiculous.

Weeell "bullshit" is easy to claim but not necessarily untrue. So with android phones this is definitely a problem. Industry wide firmware support for these ARM SOC-s are often ranging from not long enough, to fucking atrocious. You get basically two years of new drivers, and a security update maybe. The way LinageOS manages to support phones like the note 3, from like android 4, to 11, is basically creating manifests, that use drivers from newer, still supported, but "similar-ish" components. And the note 3 was a flagship device, easily the fastest phone of it's generation. These Chromebooks, especially the ones schools can and do afford, are built to the penny. There is ultimately no point in pushing a software update to a device for a significant cost, that makes it so slow that no reasonable person would ever consider using it.

What is the solution to this? Hard to say. Not buying hardware so incredibly obsolete that it has to run an alternate OS, is a start. Maybe just use PC-s and deploy linux.

That's what they should be doing, but it isn't what they're going to do, unfortunately.

Kimathi Bradford, a 16-year-old Oakland tech repair intern, has looked into whether there was a way to replace the outdated Chromebook software with a non-Google brand, but it ended up being a lot of work, Kimathi said, and the open-source replacement wasn’t up to par. “It’s like the Fritos of software,” he said. “No one really wants to use it.”

Now, I'm not sure if what they tried was Linux, but I wouldn't be too surprised. The younger generations grew up with smartphones; I feel as though operating systems will become more streamlined and opaque as time goes on. I suspect we'll have to contend with the phonification of mainstream computing in the coming years.

Ironically the only way to use some old Macbooks these days is to put Chrome OS Flex on them. Apple is far more aggressive about killing off old hardware when it feels like it. You can still use them as-is of course but over time the browser and other web based apps degrade and refuse to work because of issues with TLS, CA certs (expired), discontinued backend APIs and unsupported web content APIs.

x86 Macs are not the greatest example of longevity at this point.

The problem comes down to education institutions. I remember when we got Chromebooks in my highschool (8 years ago) admins forgot to turn of developer mode and half the school unenrolled the Chromebook managing to bypass all restrictions. This went on for half a year until one day our school needed to run a state exam (more for measure of schools performance not as a college entrance exam or anything).

The computerized testing program required deploying a specific chrome app accessible when chrome book is logged out (can't just download from chrome web store). When they tried to push the client since half of Chromebooks were unenrolled it failed. This required the school it to recall pretty much all chrome books to manually re enroll all of them and disable developer mode (prevents unenrolling and prevents sideloading Linux).

Problem is if older Chromebooks are used for Linux in an educational environment there would be nothing stopping a student from whipping up a bootable USB and dumping another distro (bypassing restrictions). I'm also not sure if there is a enrollment mode equivalent Linux (there may be but not sure).

At least that's my two cents (not a school it admin just a memory from the past 😉).