Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms

Re:Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms by ecspike on Friday March 03, 2017 @12:30AM (#13780953)

There are a couple of Chrome apps that can run offline and do coding. I've used Caret and Advanced REST client on occasion for things. It gets a bit tricky if you need something that can't work without a real webserver but there's a lot of beginner stuff you can do with it.

crouton unlocked a bit more functionality giving you the possibility of a Linux base layer, albeit likely not a great idea to have kids put the machines into dev mode. But that might be workable if staff did it.

I've dogfooded a bunch of the Web Development content we make at Udacity using either a pure Chromebook or Chromebook + Crouton.

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Re:Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms by intoverflow2 on Friday March 03, 2017 @09:19AM (#13782941)

> crouton

Correct me if I'm wrong but is this not the hack where every time you boot your system it tells you to press a key to reset it and if you press that key it instantly blanks the partition.

This seem absurd even for an expert user to use full time let alone school kids.

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Re:Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms by carussell on Friday March 03, 2017 @09:53AM (#13783206)

That's not crouton. That comes from Google's coreboot-derived firmware. See https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/2014-firmware-summit

It's true, though, that the whole process needs to be made more straightforward and easily circumventable. It's just not a part of crouton.

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Re:Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms by intoverflow2 on Friday March 03, 2017 @11:20AM (#13783889)

Ok but one press of space during boot on this scary looking screen [1] and the whole system will need to be reinstalled and all data on the linux partition will be lost correct?

Just finding it ridiculous that HN users suggest this with a straight face every time we have this discussion.

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/os-veri...

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Re:Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms by carussell on Friday March 03, 2017 @02:43PM (#13785646)

Yes. It's stupid and is worse than it needs to be. See my last paragraph. I don't know what else I can say.

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Re:Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms by canuckintime on Friday March 03, 2017 @01:33AM (#13781145)

Please describe your PURE Chromebook setup to take the Udacity Web Development Course.

Also is there a PURE Chromebook (or Chromebook+Android apps) setup to take an Udacity Android course?

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Re:Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms by pjmlp on Friday March 03, 2017 @02:03AM (#13781231)

Apparently ChromeOS devices are so useful that everyone has to force developer mode with Crouton to make use of them.

Never got the point of a browser based OS.

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Re:Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms by toast0 on Friday March 03, 2017 @03:22AM (#13781494)

A browser only OS isn't for everyone, but it does work well for the many people who literally never use anything other than their browser. If you know someone who never uses office applications and is always ending up with three layers of malware, a chromebook might be good for them. Video chat is a bit iffy too, if you don't care for google hangouts.

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Re:Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms by bitmapbrother on Friday March 03, 2017 @03:24AM (#13781504)

No, everyone does not have to force developer mode on. If you need the extra functionality then it's an option for some people. As for the point of Chrome OS, well, it's for people that don't need the bag of hurt desktop OS's provide.

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