> a vendor locked in Chromebook

Choose your poison. Macbooks are tightly knit with Apple and phone home, but are absurdly expensive and people pay for the privilege of getting spied on. Same with Chromebooks: we're just another datapoint for Google, and much more data is collected. Why not hand out Thinkpads flashed with Trisquel Linux[0]? (A Libre Linux that respects privacy?). And don't get me started on Windows 10/11 lol.

[0] https://trisquel.info/

What normal person wants a Thinkpad with Trisquel Linux? If you market the Chromebook as a general purpose coreboot compatible laptop (since 2013) and give them no OS I'm sure the same person that wants a Thinkpad would be even happier.

At that price point, I'm willing to bet Secure Boot is locked. That means the user can only run Windows or a small subset of Linux distros with lagging kernel versions.

Yes, being a government body they could get a larger discount on bulk orders, and having a computer that can run all software instead of just the web browser (that Chrome OS only allows) will actually help communities.

$61.25 more than the $198.75 per unit (https://dhcd.maryland.gov/Documents/PressReleases/2023-OSB-D...) although Dell surely would have found an equivalent with a 135,000 volume discount

Chromebooks can run windows executables as progressive webapps now if I recall.

It fills with malware so much faster, too!

Wait, vendor locked?

I was about to get a chromebook for $120 and put some linux on it.

I got one with the same intent and it’s not as easy as it used to be sadly. I was disappointed.

https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

If you want to get a Google account there’s Crostini, but it’s not the same. AFAICT you need to log in with a Google account.

Dude... This is a steal. Wow.