>And yet, google has induced millions of families to spend their limited computing budget on a "non-programmable" OS. As far as I am aware, chromebooks in educ

>And yet, google has induced millions of families to spend their limited computing budget on a "non-programmable" OS. As far as I am aware, chromebooks in education are provided by school districts, families aren't paying for it directly. You can always resort to "they are paying for it with taxes", but that would be the same for any non-chromebooks as well, except it would end up being more expensive (they won't be sold at as high of a loss as google can afford with chromebooks; count all that extra IT administration needed for non-chromebooks, adding a lot of costs as well). >Was it really beyond google's capabilities to make this a more open, perhaps linux based environment? It wasn't beyond their capabilities, it just wasn't a good idea for the purposes chromebooks were supposed to serve.