But they're not. You can, with the proper incantations of "fiddling keys you can't do remotely," boot anything you want on them. Just disable the secure boot stuff, which is a designed in, required feature for a Chromebook, and run whatever.
> Yes, security people may love that, but in reality, the entire point of processors is to run code.
If you let a computer, connected to the internet, run any code that is sent its way, it will eventually run mostly malware. Probably foreign, and while well behaved, still quite unwelcome.
What's fun is when you shut down that sketchy looking outbound traffic, and it turns out to be a new Windows telemetry service thing.
I also find, driving with kiddos through sketchy places on the internet and getting deliberately infected, so they learn what to look for, and letting your user's educate you on software they need/want also cuts down on the necessity for cargo cult infosec practices.
User's are not stupid, nor Lusers. Developers, programmer's, and the companies that pay them are not fond of repetition, expect you to only use their thing and bend over backwards for their convenience, and are often in it not for producing Quality software, but for the paycheck.
Admittedly, my practices don't scale to the point of being taught as general infosec practice, as I'm in it for the long haul for the hope that one day computer literacy will be as widely spread as regular literacy. We'll see if I live long enough. (Probably won't).
Fast updates are enabled by heavily locking in what user's are able to do with them. No exotic checks to be done.
I am not impressed by Chromebooks in those regards at all. Different strokes I suppose.
I might give you the screen, but to be honest, most of the time Chromebooks find their way to me it's because they're broken, and I'm everybody's computer guy of last resort due to high tolerance for frustration. All of them have had their screens or MOBO's rendered inoperable. Further, I philosophically reject anything that cannot be side loaded or is so locked down you can't load software onto it from external media.
Yes, security people may love that, but in reality, the entire point of processors is to run code. If I can't get my code to the processor that needs to run it without hostage negotiations, then that is not a useful machine to me. That is a niche PoS. Which all power to those who need it as such. Just isn't high on my list of things to actively purchase.