That’s why Chromebooks are a lot better choice - $150 buys you a reasonable example and you also don’t have to worry about kid breaking it and loosing weeks of work.

Example: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-11-6-chromebook-intel-cele...

And for older kids, there’s Linux support, etc.

In reply to the viability of Chromebooks: I have a 4 year old Asus Flip with a Rockchip processor & 4 GB. I still use it because I love the very small laptop form factor. Despite having a processor which would be jealous of the Celeron, it keeps up just fine. Most common websites do fine. YouTube is smooth. FB is mostly smooth. Google does a great job with Chrome OS. I’d have no hesitation buying a Celeron Chromebook for a kid. As long as it was new enough to have at least 5 years of support left, and had a minimum of 4 gigs memory, they should be fine for the foreseeable future.

Teachers who cannot understand why you can't use the Apple Store on an Android fare no better at understanding that they can't run X proprietary Windows program on a Chromebook.

That could be solvable with something like cross-over: https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-chromeos

Of course, in the context of low income, ideally the district would provide standardized choices or offer crossover as a supported alternative.

I’m not familiar with this program, but it seems like Google has made efforts in this direction: https://edu.google.com/products/chromebooks/

Generally speaking, proprietary educational software cannot run under Wine and friends, mostly because it tends to be rather poorly written in the first place, full of Undefined Behaviour.

A lot of schools do generally offer standardised hardware & software. For example, at the last school I was admin at, we had a Lenovo range, and a series of programs to help poor families afford them. (Tablets at primary school, one kind of laptop at middle school and a more powerful laptop at senior school).

However, I still, in three years, could not force around a dozen teachers to understand the limitations of their platform. Official policy was actually that a teacher may not use a piece of software without getting it approved by IT - so that we could check it was compatible, and automate rollout across all the devices.

The problem, most simply put, is that teachers would get excited about a piece of software, build their entire curriculum around it, and not involve IT at any point in the process whilst simultaneously having no idea how software works.

This sore point wasn't isolated at all either, at conference when the entire town's IT teams got together (we exchanged talking points, software and regularly donated our older hardware to less-well-off schools), it was the most common anecdote, followed up by most school administrations being entirely unwilling to have IT's back when we would be unable to deploy a particular teacher's favourite software that wouldn't run on the accepted platform.

How long is a single Chromebook supposed to be viable? $150 is $150, but $150 for a Celeron and a nice display might not handle web standards for much longer.