Maybe this is a hot take. However, a lot of the Chromebooks that were deployed by schools during covid are build like tanks while being super lightweight and having great battery life. Meanwhile the old thinkpads are 10 years old and are probably starting to wear down. Many Chromebooks support coreboot these days so theoretically they have the potential to be more private and secure. Some of them are also arm which means that they are more efficient from an architecture perspective.
Edit:
I like how incredibly controversial this is. I have successfully split the votes
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There’s certainly a case to be made for saving Chromebooks from the landfill by installing Linux. There will be plenty of people who will be happy to have one. But that will be a different target audience than the people who use old ThinkPads.
Modern Chromebooks are typically slower and more resource limited than even quite old laptops ( like Thinkpads ). They may also be difficult to service and expand.
Chromebooks as a class may become common devices. Sadly though, I think most of them are destined to be e-waste.
Lot easier to swap parts on a thinkpad.
I am on a backpacking trip with my son right now. I wanted a laptop but did not want to carry anything heavy and did not want to be upset if it was broken or stolen.
I bought a 2013 MacBook Air off eBay for $60 and put EndeavourOS on it ( 128 GB SSD and 8 GB of RAM ). The webcam did not work out-of-the-box but the driver for that was in the AUR ( so just a simple ‘pacman -S’ post install ) and everything else worked perfectly.
The apps I have used so far on the trip are LibreOffice, Firefox / Edge, Email, IntelliJ IDEA, and Microsoft Teams. I built an up-to-date version of the Ladybird browser just to check-in on the status. The MacBook has performed wonderfully and exceeded my expectations.
I guess my point is, even when my requirements were perfect for a Chromebook, I still did not even think of one. This machine is so beautiful, I cannot imagine why I would settle for a Chromebook next time. How much cheaper is it going to be than $60?
The problem with chromebooks is that the base specs are pretty shit. A lot of them have 4 GiB of RAM and maybe 16GiB of disk if you’re lucky.
They were designed to be thin clients to connect students to the internet, and little else. Maybe they could be hacked into something useful, but I don’t think it’ll ever make a good PC. They were always destined for the landfill.
Meanwhile, the best thinkpads were quality machines back when they came out. IMO, that’s why they’re still so versatile today. Free software can’t fix bad fundamentals.
I’m not so sure… for the following reasons:
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Despite using a version of the Linux kernel in ChromeOS, Chromebooks don’t always have the best hardware (ie. driver) support from the mainline kernel used by most distributions. That’s why there are niche distributions like GalliumOS which provide tweaks to support the touchpad and audio devices in many Chromebooks. It’s similar to how Android is Linux, but it’s not standard Linux as we are familiar with (so the hardware support is different).
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Many Chromebooks have really poor specs: low-wattage CPUs, small amounts of storage, low amounts of RAM. While they may be newer, they are actually probably less performant than older laptops. This has changed in recent years with the new Chromebook plus program (or whatever it is called) which mandates a reasonable set of baseline features, but that is talking about current Chromebooks and not the ones from the COVID era.
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Related to the previous point, many Chromebooks are not serviceable or upgradeable while Thinkpads and some recent laptops are. You are unlikely to open up a Chromebook and be able to replace say the RAM or SSD, which would be a show stopper for a lot of people that like Thinkpads.
So… unfortunately, I think this take is a bit of a miss and I dont’ really see it happening. I would be happy to be proven wrong though since my kids have two Chromebooks from the COVID era :}
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Thinkpads are fairly powerful as laptops go. Are you talking about some very strong variety of chromebook here?
The ones from schools are very tuff. I wouldn’t call a 10-15 year old thinkpad powerful
No way. My T420 with a 3.4ghz 4c8t i7 absolutely outpaces any celeron POS Chromebook. Either you don’t have much experience with good (T-series) Thinkpads or you don’t have much experience with Chromebooks.
They are built like tanks? The Chromebook laptops I’ve come across were flimsy as aluminiumfoil. The plastic hinges were so weak you had to try to not tear the screen from the keyboard!
That has not been my experience. If that was the case schools wouldn’t be buying them.
At least here I’m pretty sure schools just buy them because they come laughably cheap. Actually, my middle school’s laptops weren’t very durable either but just cheap.
Actually, now that I think of it, Chromebooks can be manufactured by anyone just like Windows laptopa, a Chromebook is just any laptop with ChromeOS pre-installed. There are probably well-built ones (maybe by Lenovo, even?) and there are probably flimsy-made ones, depending on your manufacturer?
Google ran a huge push to get these into schools too… There was a LOT of pressure on Schools to adopt from various partners (or at least that happened in the UK)…
Google is aware of the Microsoft gains from getting people used to their products at a young age…
I’m not a thinkpad guy, but I thought one reason for people liking old thinkpads is that the old ones came with cpu’s that predate the intel management engine.
Exactly. The ARM Chromebooks can run coreboot in a lot of cases. I am not sure about WiFi and GPU acceleration but at least those can be isolated if necessary.
Coreboot does not remove IME. Libreboot (a coreboot distro) does. Or neuter it.
It can be configured however you want. Also ARM devices don’t have ME
