I love honestly love a lot of Chromebook hardware. It's honestly exactly what I want in a laptop - long battery life, efficient, lightweight, decent enough keyboard.
But it's impossible to get without giving Google money, and without dealing with a massive warning every time you boot - if you're model even lets you install something other than Chrome OS.
I should really grab a Pinebook Pro I guess.
And that's without getting into all the privacy issues of students being forced to use Google software/hardware, or the schools spying on students through the Chromebooks.
You can get rid of the warning by physically removing a write-protect screw and replacing the firmware. It's still a very user-hostile feature because it's not just a 'warning' either, but actively prompts you to wipe your existing installation. That sort of thing is very much what you'd expect in a toy, not a machine for serious use.
Wiping the installation is very much expected. The security model includes protecting data, of course data has to be wiped when removing security. Data on disk is encrypted with a key stored in the security chip, which destroys the key when security settings are changed.
Android does the same for fastboot unlock.
What's the big deal? If you want to flash UEFI and use a custom OS, why would you want to preserve the ChromeOS partition?
Check out this FAQ that's scoped around a custom Arch Linux ARM but gives you an idea of the pain: https://github.com/SvenKiljan/archlinuxarm-pbp/blob/main/FAQ...
For thoughts on why Pine64 seems to be stuck in this state of never fully working hardware I can recommend Drew DeVault's blogpost: https://drewdevault.com/2022/01/18/Pine64s-weird-priorities....
The postmarketOS folks have significant experience with mainlining kernel support for hardware that's only supported in downstream/vendor kernels. Please reach out to them and make sure they know about the issues; this work should be plenty relevant to them because Pine64 is also doing mobile HW.
Yes, however now is a bad time. They are out of stock and struggling to source parts last I checked. I think screens are the main issue.
That's not even the most painful part. Full data wipe when switching between security modes is outright user-hostile, and would be widely considered as unacceptable if Microsoft or Apple did that on their general-purpose computing platforms.
I don't think it's user hostile to prevent all security models from being dragged to the lowest common denominator. If they didn't do that, an attacker could just switch to a more insecure mode and go after your data.
It's rather the reverse. How macOS handles it is by asking for user credentials on a security policy downgrade, and enforcing that by the Secure Enclave.
(and if you have user creds, you _have access to user data anyway_)
On other platforms, that tying... just doesn't exist.
Somehow I got downvoted for it.
"Against will" probably only applies to the families with people technical enough to understand what having an enterprise managed Chromebook that their child has to be on for 8 hours a day means.
It was a very low grade HP chromebook that was shamed by the performance of a raspberry pi 3b. I have been thinking of gutting it and installing a pi inside to make a pibook.
EDIT: To everyone downvoting this: nobody cares, nobody is listening to you.