Chromebooks

Part of the reason for Chromebooks’ popularity is that they have seen extensive adoption in the classroom. They have a low price tag (except the fancy ones), an impressive battery life, yet enough power to deal with word processing, web browsing and whatever else it is kids do. Students have not been dissuaded by their lack of storage, since once you get into the mindset of saving everything to the cloud, it becomes second nature, and obviates the old problems of keeping track of multiple versions of a document, or saving it to a dodgy USB and losing it for ever. Nor are they concerned about their devices being stultified where internet access is not available, presumably because they don’t go to such places often. There are benefits of having a cloud-administered OS too – it generally doesn’t break, for one thing, and the fact that it’s so locked down reduces the risk of malware. If something does go wrong, the device can happily be reset back to factory settings and the user can start over. Almost all Chromebooks use Coreboot firmware to boot, which, although it incorporates some binary blobs, negates some of the risks of proprietary firmware. Of course, Chrome OS isn’t open source (though it is built using the Gentoobased Chromium OS), and Gallium OS makes an excellent, stylish alternative that doesn’t suffer the performance quirks that go with using Crouton to set up Linux inside a Chrome OS chroot. Using a proper Linux distro with limited storage requires discipline, though.