Please forgive me for failing to get this idea across clearly, and I will try again, because I consider it an important one:
There are people in the world, many people, who do not have any access to either money or the ability to choose their computing device, and the only devices they have available to them, if they are lucky, are the ones which they have already been granted by the circumstances.
These people include, but are not limited to, people in disadvantaged financial situations, such as countries with low monetary flow; those living in abusive households, especially minors; those imprisoned or otherwise having their freedom restricted; those attached to a device for sentimental reasons; those who are able to exchange money for a device, as you suggest, and are waiting for it to arrive.
To the overwhelming majority of the world, 300 dollars, or even 20 dollars, is a huge sum, one that is either unattainable, or can only be attained through much struggle, difficulty, and sacrifice.
To an individual in such a situation, their Chromebook, or 10-year-old Android phone, or 20-year-old PC, may be the only option at accessing the digital world. And we should do everything in our power to facilitate their ability to use such a device.
I can’t argue with that. That is why I hope end of life chromebooks are not landfill. A good outcome is a container of them going to help poor people.
Prisons are an interesting one. The constraint is political not financial, at least for US prisons. Probably giving someone a access to a $1k computer requires $10k to feed the rent seekers inbetween. And that is if we even value not punishing prisoners beyond the fact they are inside anyway.
$500 Lenovo in North America, flips all the way open, had to swap the WiFI ($25), drop that trash RealTek and add Intel. Big SDD, 8 cores. Runs Gentoo+Xfce. Multi touch, webcam, all work a treat. I prefer it to a similar sized Chromebook ($400) cause it's got more power.
Things you get on a Chromebook that you don't get on a 300-euro laptop with Linux include: working multitouch input devices, working webcams, working suspend and resume, working audio, working wifi, and 7 years of software support.
> Because you can also buy a real PC pre-loaded with GNU/Linux for about the same price, around 300 euros.
In the US, decent Chromebooks usually go for about 200 USD. Decent meaning intel mainstream core processors. From what I've seen, those tend to be well supported by 3rd party firmwares; Intel Atom based Chromebooks seem to have a lot of delays in support, ARM based seem to be mostly unsupported, I don't know about AMD based. It's better to confirm the 3rd party firmware details before purchase, of course, but Intel mainstream core is a good rule of thumb; and it's a good rule of thumb for performance too (although current AMD is likely better if you know you can boot your OS of choice)
Gallium OS worked great... until it got abandoned.
Then, those seeking updates were stuck finding a distro that worked well, with available drivers, had to deal with the stupid keyboard and remapping the keys, etc.
A relative still uses an Asus C200 Chromebook. When GalliumOS was abandonned, we were able to successfully install Linux Mint. Mainline Linux now works correctly, we took some packages related to the keyboard from GalliumOS and pinned them. A bit annoying but workable.
The sound has always been capricious though, but it was also the case on GalliumOS.*
I think buying this machine was a good call at the time, almost 10 years ago. Very good battery life, lightweight, cheap and now we know, incredibly durable.
But I'm with you. It definitely was a maintenance burden and it's good that this relative is patient with the flaws that it exhibits, and its slowness.
Today, it would make more sense to just buy a refurbished pro laptop and put Linux on it and be done with it. It'll be as cheap, but the whole experience will be way better. That's what I do for me, and that's what we'll probably do with this relative when they or the machine gives up, which does not seem to want to happen. Good for the environment I guess.
If it's cheap (and shabby) enough to reason once in 3 years upgrade, that is no longer a problem. And that's exactly how long my Lenovo laptops tend to survive these days.
I would certainly never buy a new one, but there are tons of used Chromeboxes/books for sale on Ebay and elsewhere at very convenient prices. I've reflashed a good number of them and installed various Linux distros; this can be invaluable for people who need an unrestricted OS but have not much money to spend on a new PCs, beside repurposing hardware that could end up in a drawer or, worse, in a landfill.
For those interested, my method of choice is described at https://mrchromebox.tech/
It is not destructive, one can backup and restore the original firmware at any moment, although I wouldn't see any reason to do that.
