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The first line of the article is misleading. It's not just about a "crappy laptop", it's about locked-down devices (ChromeOS, iPad) that have had their support
by chungy 5y ago
The first line of the article is misleading. It's not just about a "crappy laptop", it's about locked-down devices (ChromeOS, iPad) that have had their support terms expire. I suppose that is crappy, but it's not quite the image I'd conjure myself.
For various reasons but mainly because I so rarely use laptops, I have a crappy laptop from ca. 2010. It's slow, with a spinning-rust hard disk and an Intel Celeron from its day; it's a miracle it even allowed up to a 4GB RAM upgrade. With a GPU that can barely manage to process a 1366x768 framebuffer needed for the built-in screen, it's an unpleasant experience all around. By all means it's the definition of crappy laptop and that held even when the thing was new.
All the same, it has no problem running Debian 11, and both the newest Chromium and Firefox can at least launch on it. It does take half a minute for the browser windows to actually appear, but it works, more or less. The per-site experience after this depends heavily on how much "cool tech" web site developers have opted to use. YouTube is practically unusable even in the tiny video window it displays and 360p videos. Hacker News is perfectly fine.
Perhaps bias on my own part, but I would argue that this case is the crappy laptop that's reasonable to optimize for. It may not be pleasant, but for large classes of web sites, it should be bearable to some extent. I'm pretty sure both the Chromebook and iPad mentioned in the article have better hardware specs than my thing, but they're both made by companies that are far too willing to drop support after a short period, leaving users in an insecure status and many of them just don't know why web sites stop working.
- modeless 5y agoChrome OS devices are not locked down in the slightest. You can run any browser you want in Chrome OS via the Play Store or as a Linux app. Furthermore, every Chrome OS device can be unlocked to run any OS you want. You can install Chromium OS, Linux, or even Windows if you like. They are not at all like iPads.
- hannasanarion 5y agoCan your grandma do that? If not, then it is a de-facto locked-down device. It shouldn't take technical expertise to keep consumer electronics usable.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoMine could. (I know the point you're trying to make, but “grandma” and “person who wants to see computers as tools, rather than puzzles” are not synonymous.)
- hannasanarion 5y agoBeing able to use a tool isn't the same as being able to transform a tool into a totally different type of tool. Someone shouldn't have to learn how to install and use linux just to use their 2014 laptop to browse the internet.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoI understand that; I know many other people who wouldn't be able to deal with this. Just… my grandmother isn't one of them. (Sure, she isn't a “computer person” and doesn't really like the things, so she'd have trouble working it out on her own, but she's able to follow instructions and deal with the computer deviating slightly from how the instructions say it will react.) I'm not criticising your point; just nitpicking your use of “grandma” as a signifier for the kind of person who can't deal with how garbage modern computers are. It's stereotypical, and only makes sense if you know those stereotypes; that's perpetuating stereotypes, and it also makes your writing inaccessible for people not familiar with the way your culture sees old women.
- jpindar 5y agoThank you.
- modeless 5y agoSure she could, given appropriate instructions and a reason to care about it. Why not? She's a capable person. Also, she could buy a secondhand one that's already been unlocked, or sell hers to someone who can still make use of it by unlocking it, or whatever. The point is, the end of support does not render the hardware useless and/or a security disaster waiting to happen.
- otherotherchris 5y agoI have a late 2006 Core 2 Duo Macbook pro with 4GB ram and a 128GB SATA SSD running Mint 20. Same deal, everything but video runs fine. Youtube crawls on anything older than Haswell due to a lack of H.264 hardware acceleration. Youtube has made a business decision to not waste bandwidth and disk space on older codecs.