> Perhaps they should flatten them and put a proper OS on them with proper storage and teach kids the importance of data sovereignty and computer freedom.

It's a cute idea, but these lucky kids are probably 'upgrading' to Windows 11 with some nice in-school MDM. It's always frying-pan-to-fire situations when people get pedantic like this.

Putting a proper OS = kids bypass the "security" and play games during class time. And you end up buying low performing spinning rust based laptops, because of the Windows license cost and higher system requirements for Windows machines.

Everything kids used to do with PCs that teachers didn't want them to is how they eventually became programmers.

Eh, I don't think playing trivia games and Worms instead of doing trivial (for me) stuff with Word/Excel or writing useless (for me) Visual Basic had much to do with how i became a programmer (taught myself PHP and then used it to write a terribly insecure CMS for the school parliament, partially to impress a girl).

I do think that the "curiosity" spirit applied when trying to circumvent restrictions (in school or from my parents) did help though.

My school used chrome books and one of my classmates ((sixth form)last 2 years of high school for Americans) literally took it apart and reassembled it again to replace a certain part after it fried and he didn’t want to pay for another one, he found the chip code and bought it from Amazon. That guy is in uni for compsci now,

Myth.

True for you and me and so it seems true. But everyone else does the same things just maybe a year later, for their own non-programmer mundane reasons and never become programmers, or even close.

<name> spent years on irc and circumventing various copy protections and using p2p filesharing systems, but they just liked <artist> and so did everyone else in those irc channels, and that was that. They are so not-a-programmer they're almost a charicature of a normie. I have to perform the most basic of IT tasks for them, like, why is the sound coming out of the laptop instead of the headphones basic.

<name> learned how to mod video games yet is also not a programmer or in any remotely IT related field and practically a charaicature of a normie.

Once I noticed a few examples consciously like this, I saw that they are actually everywhere.