I think Linux (Ubuntu or Mint) would be great, so students can help build what the big corps are trying to crush and the fact that it really is an outstanding platform to learn from. I wish people would see how these proprietary boxes are not only crap but undermine the open-source community.

The comment "I really don't want to deal with OS upgrades...", does not make sense, as I would think a student (at least when I was one) we wanted to upgrade our OS and for free made it even better. You can also customize a Linux REALLY easy, and that is something as a student I was looking for. So low cost and great power is what at least a tech student would be looking for.

Say you use Windows, 1. Turn on automatic updates (default option, I think) 2. Use something like MS Security essentials

And, if you use Linux, 1. Update regularly, again I guess most distros have a default option to check for updates on boot. And, you don't need to upgrade your OS unless you want/have to.

How much more do you want to dumb it down? For basic use as you mentioned, to research and write articles, you are almost doing nothing already with windows/linux

ChromeOS is dumbed down so much more than that, insofar as nothing ever breaks, update reboots only take a few (<10) seconds, behavior encountered is always 100% predictable, and with a browser being the only available interactive display mode, WYSIWYG. My wife has a MacBook and I have a cheap Acer Revo mini-PC, but she also has a new HP Chromebook and I spend most of my time on either the Pixel in my office or the Samsung Chromebook I'm typing on now. Except for things like needing a traditional OS for random third party hardware support (e.g. Fitbit sync, printer, scanner) or extremely rare requirements for MS Office or photo management, we'd function very well with just browsers.

I know this is an aside, but one of the things that irritates me most about the modern web, and Google's "solution" especially, is photo management. Picasa on the desktop is simplistic but generally 100% ok, but Google+ Photos leads to horrifically unpleasant workflows, and god help you if you want print anything or share on non-Google properties.

I can't upvote strongly enough about the photo stuff.

Recently I discovered that Google+, Facebook etc. all like to interpret "sharing" a photo to mean sharing a link to the page with the photo on it, not to actually share the photo, which is what the user really wants to have happen, not to mention the PITA this is to automate because it suddenly means these photos are behind authorisation walls. (This is on top of how aggressively Google tries to get any photos you take, or send via Gmail, into G+ in the first place).

Quite honestly I've had it with any cloud service that acts like this, and now choose to spam them with irrelevant nonsense of no consequence.

Ugh. Windows always decides to update at the worst times. On University computers we'll do tests on computers for some subjects, and sometimes the computers will be updating or randomly broken somehow...

As for Linux, it's great, doesn't even need to boot to check for updates (I never turn my laptop off, just suspend - doesn't get rebooted for weeks), and you can lock it down sufficiently to prevent tampering/breaking, but there's not many consumer computers with a full Linux distro other than the Raspberry Pi - which would be great, but still 30 dollars each + peripherals is much more than $0.