Anyone selling a computer to an institution, like a school or company, it is expected that they will be locked down, especially if the end user isn’t technical.
If anything, if google didn’t make things locked down and controlled schools would never have bought them and had to worry about debugging the 20 kid’s messed up environments.
Kids SHOULD have been tinkering with their own private computers, a laptop from their parents or something like that.
The issue is
All tech companies, Google, Apple, Microsoft, are all pushing for users to store their stuff in their clouds instead of locally on their machines and having to worry about their local filesystems, and their local environments.
Software as a Service, or much better environment standardization through things like steam means if you want to just use software it usually works without much effort. You don’t need to debug bad installs or dive through the installations unless you want to mod things, and even then many things have native mod support so you don’t even need to poke through the folder structure or understand how software loading works to run sophisticated mods for most games.
Schools setup their Windows machines in the same way. There is (for a rule abiding student) hardly any difference between a locked down Windows system and a Chromebook.
And the locking down is probably way better. When I was a kid we could just stick a cracked copy of halo on a flash drive and play with our friends after school using the school’s local network.
Anyone selling a computer to an institution, like a school or company, it is expected that they will be locked down, especially if the end user isn’t technical.
If anything, if google didn’t make things locked down and controlled schools would never have bought them and had to worry about debugging the 20 kid’s messed up environments.
Kids SHOULD have been tinkering with their own private computers, a laptop from their parents or something like that.
The issue is
All tech companies, Google, Apple, Microsoft, are all pushing for users to store their stuff in their clouds instead of locally on their machines and having to worry about their local filesystems, and their local environments.
Software as a Service, or much better environment standardization through things like steam means if you want to just use software it usually works without much effort. You don’t need to debug bad installs or dive through the installations unless you want to mod things, and even then many things have native mod support so you don’t even need to poke through the folder structure or understand how software loading works to run sophisticated mods for most games.
Schools setup their Windows machines in the same way. There is (for a rule abiding student) hardly any difference between a locked down Windows system and a Chromebook.
And the locking down is probably way better. When I was a kid we could just stick a cracked copy of halo on a flash drive and play with our friends after school using the school’s local network.