Re:Chromebooks will get 10 years of automatic updates
by toast0 on Thursday September 14, 2023 @03:25PM
(#37513621)
If the hardware is still working, and the battery works enough to run off AC, even a 10 year old machine is still usable for a lot of stuff.
I got an Acer Chromebook C720 in 2013ish, and the dual-core Celeron 2955U (Haswell) with 4GB of RAM is still ok. The touchpad stopped working in mine, and I dunno how bad the battery is, and I installed FreeBSD for fun after ChromeOS stopped updating, but I bet it'd run ChromeOS Flex no problem. It doesn't have the virtualization extension needed to run Android apps (not part of ChromeOS Flex anyway), but I don't think there's anything else missing really.
I'll probably install ChromeOS Flex on my Lenovo ThinkPad 13 Chromebook after I let the final official OS update simmer a bit more (it's a pain to get to the firmware write protect screw), it's a much nicer case and a little bit newer processor, but otherwise pretty close to the Acer one; and the touch pad still works. OTOH, I don't think I can change out the storage and as I mentioned the write protect screw is hard to access.
I got an Acer Chromebook C720 in 2013ish, and the dual-core Celeron 2955U (Haswell) with 4GB of RAM is still ok. The touchpad stopped working in mine, and I dunno how bad the battery is, and I installed FreeBSD for fun after ChromeOS stopped updating, but I bet it'd run ChromeOS Flex no problem. It doesn't have the virtualization extension needed to run Android apps (not part of ChromeOS Flex anyway), but I don't think there's anything else missing really.
I'll probably install ChromeOS Flex on my Lenovo ThinkPad 13 Chromebook after I let the final official OS update simmer a bit more (it's a pain to get to the firmware write protect screw), it's a much nicer case and a little bit newer processor, but otherwise pretty close to the Acer one; and the touch pad still works. OTOH, I don't think I can change out the storage and as I mentioned the write protect screw is hard to access.