Hmm. I appreciate the sentiment behind the author's desire to do this. But I'm wondering: - Did it void a warranty if it was still valid, and the tampering wi

Hmm. I appreciate the sentiment behind the author's desire to do this. But I'm wondering: - Did it void a warranty if it was still valid, and the tampering with the case had damaged some hardware that the end user can't fix on her own? - Does the user require knowledge of GalliumOS, and understand that updates may need to be pulled manually? - Can common college programs in her major be run on GalliumOS and on the hardware defined by Chromebooks (low-end)? Can she run SSH to Linux or VNC for Windows w/o difficulty? I agree having one corporation say to the poor and the young and the otherwise disenfranchised that a corporate, locked-down operating system is good for you is not a great idea. It trades your freedom for convenience, and no matter how appealing that may be for both parties (the end user for cheapness and ease of use, and the corporation for not having to deal with the insanity and unworkablity of some users), it's not a good tradeoff in the long run for anybody, including the corporation that discovers too late that hiring the same sheep it raised is bad. But I don't think this is the right way to go about it. Shrieking the principles of Stallman from a hill just makes you look like an old crazy person. I personally didn't get to love Linux until I had a MacBook Pro, a UNIX fork that works pretty nicely on a laptop, and moved slowly into Linux until I prefer the CLI over GUIs for many things now. At every stage of my transition, everything worked, and worked best for me, and I understood why I needed to move further. Doing something like this and encountering issues solved by ChromeOS may create a negative impression of Linux in a young mind, which is the exact opposite of what you want to do. As an alternative way forward, I installed Ubuntu on my parent's laptop after Windows 10 kept freezing up on them. Yes, it has binary blobs and a corporation runs it and whatnot, but it works and it's still Linux. My dad got a virus from downloading a YouTube video somehow, and I could fix it because I could reinstall chrome using 'apt', and taught him how to use 'youtube-dl' instead (open terminal, paste, enter key). I don't think he cares that it's Linux, but I do think he is happy it works and I can fix it when it goes wrong. You never want to do the right thing by going against the laws of power, because that's how you end up as cannon fodder and a footnote in an moldy AP compsci textbook somewhere.