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I'd say this is a fair assessment of the project. It came off as overambitious with a number of high-risk project management decisions made at the expensive of

I'd say this is a fair assessment of the project. It came off as overambitious with a number of high-risk project management decisions made at the expensive of a minimum-viable initial product. And this was just looking at it from an engineering point of view, ignoring whether it did actually provide value over other options for educational spending in developing countries. Funny enough it seems like the hype it generated was its main contribution, which led to the netbook product segment and ultimately Chromebooks. I'd say its spiritual descendent is the humble grades 7-12 school chromebook with much more conventional hardware and software choices. The killer app for school Chromebooks is the combination of Google Docs and whatever Google's classroom management software is, provided cheap to schools in a long-game move by Google to hook a future generation on their office suite. Ironically, despite the very agressive price points of sub-$200 Chromebooks, their current market is limited to the US and the wealthier Commonwealth nations.

zozbot234 5y ago
> Ironically, despite the very agressive price points of sub-$200 Chromebooks, their current market is limited to the US and the wealthier Commonwealth nations. Most likely, Chromebooks are too dependent on the "cloud" to be useful in middle-income countries with comparatively flimsy Internet connectivity. A general-purpose x86 laptop will simply go a lot further there. (And if you put a lightweight OS on it, you will almost never be limited by performance for basic workloads, even on old hardware.)
- killjoywashere 5y ago
  This. I'm in the military, so keenly interested in how much you can do without network. I have two XO-1 laptops and I was a Cr-48 test pilot (their label for their beta testers). I took the Cr-48 with me to Japan for Fukushima in 2011. ChromeOS was not all that useful. Why run ChromeOS when Xubuntu is available? Lubuntu? Pick your favorite lightweight Linux distro. After about a week I cried uncle and installed Xubuntu. Depending on network for the ability to type a document is non-sensical. If I recall, Google Docs didn't have offline mode yet, but due to that experience I have keenly attended to offline mode. It improves things, but it's not a panacea. I don't think a laptop without network is ever going to be as awesome as one with network, but there's a lot of room on a laptop to do more than run AJAX applications in a browser (do they still talk about AJAX?) that offload all the smarts to a server-side app.
  - staticassertion 5y ago
    The CR48 was over a decade ago wasn't it? I was also a cr48 beta user and I recall being a teenager, which I have not been for a while. Comparing chromebooks today to the cr48 feels like comparing... idk, anything from 12 years ago to anything from today? ChromeOS can now run Android apps and a full linux environment.
    - JeremyNT 5y ago
      It's not fundamentally different though. I had the cr48 too and it was just a toy compared to a normal Linux distribution. It didn't displace my similarly underpowered Asus netbook, since the later ran Debian (I think that's the distro I ran back then). Chromebooks of today are more powerful, which they need to be because web developers of today waste more memory and CPU cycles than ever. But fundamentally the concept and limitations of these "online first" devices are similar. The ability to run Android apps is certainly a step forward, but these things are really designed to lock people into Google's cloud products first and foremost.
      - lmns 5y ago
        It is different. I can run a Debian VM with GUI applications on any recent x86 Chromebook. It's pre-installed and supported.
      - staticassertion 5y ago
        It is so, so fundamentally different. It has been over a decade. Chromebooks today run debian. I've got a debian shell right now where I'm working with intellij.
    - killjoywashere 5y ago
      > anything from 12 years ago to anything from today IDK, I have access to pretty much any hardware I want (cloud GPUs, rack-mounted DGX-type systems, actual supercomputers, yada yada) and in the evening I still sit down to use old ThinkPads. My oldest daily driver is an X201 which actually predates the Cr-48. I don't find my brain working any faster using a 16" macbook. I do find during the workday that the massive amount of screen real estate of 2 XDR monitors is handy to quickly refer across 2 or 3 applications (e.g. scribing for a document under discussion in a video call, while looking at the references under discussion, and checking my calendar with a glance)
- newsbinator 5y ago
  > middle-income countries with comparatively flimsy Internet connectivity Most middle-income countries I've been in had faster internet than the city I grew up in in Canada, and for about $10/mo. Sure, internet goes down perhaps once or twice a month for half a day or so, but it often does in rural-adjacent parts of Canada too. And in middle-income countries unlimited or near-unlimited LTE phone data for tethering is also very cheap. I never truly relied on wired internet in low-income countries, so I can't speak to those. Unless you consider Thailand or Ukraine low income. Although my internet in Belarus and Albania was fast and reliable, and I guess those are low-income countries.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    I don't think you'd find many Chromebook deployments in rural Canada, either. Having an IoT thin-client device as your main computing platform turns "internet is down/dog slow" from a mild nuisance into a total showstopper for the day.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > I've been in had faster internet than the city I grew up in in Canada, and for about $10/mo. > Sure, internet goes down perhaps once or twice a month for half a day or so, but it often does in rural-adjacent parts of Canada too With 90% of the population less than 100 miles from the US border, what's their excuse for being worse than Albania?
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      Even that relatively dense 100 miles has pretty low population density by European standards I think. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-territories-by-population-density.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-t... Even if we assume their entire population is in that 100 mile range, it is 42 people/kmsq [37.7M/(8891*100)], which is like half that of Albania. Of course the true answer is that it is our bad influence is seeping up across the boarder. Have you heard of Comcast?
    - post-it 5y ago
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  You would not believe how connected to the internet people from middle income and low income countries are. Everyone has internet. No, it’s mostly that phones are more convenient/cheap than computers. Everyone just has a cheap smartphone, computer feels redundant and expensive for what it can do. And computers are too expensive for educational segment.
a9h74j 5y ago
Provocatively, imagine if had been one Emacs per child. With EXWM. (Actually, I was recently surprised to find that after an apt-get install on a chromebook, Emacs started up in full gui mode.)
- zozbot234 5y ago
  AIUI, the basic architecture of the "Sugar" environment is quite Emacs-like, though not literally built on Emacs. That's why they thought it would be important to have a "view source" feature.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

zozbot234 5y ago

> Ironically, despite the very agressive price points of sub-$200 Chromebooks, their current market is limited to the US and the wealthier Commonwealth nations. Most likely, Chromebooks are too dependent on the "cloud" to be useful in middle-income countries with comparatively flimsy Internet connectivity. A general-purpose x86 laptop will simply go a lot further there. (And if you put a lightweight OS on it, you will almost never be limited by performance for basic workloads, even on old hardware.)

killjoywashere 5y ago
This. I'm in the military, so keenly interested in how much you can do without network. I have two XO-1 laptops and I was a Cr-48 test pilot (their label for their beta testers). I took the Cr-48 with me to Japan for Fukushima in 2011. ChromeOS was not all that useful. Why run ChromeOS when Xubuntu is available? Lubuntu? Pick your favorite lightweight Linux distro. After about a week I cried uncle and installed Xubuntu. Depending on network for the ability to type a document is non-sensical. If I recall, Google Docs didn't have offline mode yet, but due to that experience I have keenly attended to offline mode. It improves things, but it's not a panacea. I don't think a laptop without network is ever going to be as awesome as one with network, but there's a lot of room on a laptop to do more than run AJAX applications in a browser (do they still talk about AJAX?) that offload all the smarts to a server-side app.
- staticassertion 5y ago
  The CR48 was over a decade ago wasn't it? I was also a cr48 beta user and I recall being a teenager, which I have not been for a while. Comparing chromebooks today to the cr48 feels like comparing... idk, anything from 12 years ago to anything from today? ChromeOS can now run Android apps and a full linux environment.
  - JeremyNT 5y ago
    It's not fundamentally different though. I had the cr48 too and it was just a toy compared to a normal Linux distribution. It didn't displace my similarly underpowered Asus netbook, since the later ran Debian (I think that's the distro I ran back then). Chromebooks of today are more powerful, which they need to be because web developers of today waste more memory and CPU cycles than ever. But fundamentally the concept and limitations of these "online first" devices are similar. The ability to run Android apps is certainly a step forward, but these things are really designed to lock people into Google's cloud products first and foremost.
    - lmns 5y ago
      It is different. I can run a Debian VM with GUI applications on any recent x86 Chromebook. It's pre-installed and supported.
    - staticassertion 5y ago
      It is so, so fundamentally different. It has been over a decade. Chromebooks today run debian. I've got a debian shell right now where I'm working with intellij.
  - killjoywashere 5y ago
    > anything from 12 years ago to anything from today IDK, I have access to pretty much any hardware I want (cloud GPUs, rack-mounted DGX-type systems, actual supercomputers, yada yada) and in the evening I still sit down to use old ThinkPads. My oldest daily driver is an X201 which actually predates the Cr-48. I don't find my brain working any faster using a 16" macbook. I do find during the workday that the massive amount of screen real estate of 2 XDR monitors is handy to quickly refer across 2 or 3 applications (e.g. scribing for a document under discussion in a video call, while looking at the references under discussion, and checking my calendar with a glance)
newsbinator 5y ago
> middle-income countries with comparatively flimsy Internet connectivity Most middle-income countries I've been in had faster internet than the city I grew up in in Canada, and for about $10/mo. Sure, internet goes down perhaps once or twice a month for half a day or so, but it often does in rural-adjacent parts of Canada too. And in middle-income countries unlimited or near-unlimited LTE phone data for tethering is also very cheap. I never truly relied on wired internet in low-income countries, so I can't speak to those. Unless you consider Thailand or Ukraine low income. Although my internet in Belarus and Albania was fast and reliable, and I guess those are low-income countries.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  I don't think you'd find many Chromebook deployments in rural Canada, either. Having an IoT thin-client device as your main computing platform turns "internet is down/dog slow" from a mild nuisance into a total showstopper for the day.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > I've been in had faster internet than the city I grew up in in Canada, and for about $10/mo. > Sure, internet goes down perhaps once or twice a month for half a day or so, but it often does in rural-adjacent parts of Canada too With 90% of the population less than 100 miles from the US border, what's their excuse for being worse than Albania?
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    Even that relatively dense 100 miles has pretty low population density by European standards I think. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-territories-by-population-density.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/canadian-provinces-and-t... Even if we assume their entire population is in that 100 mile range, it is 42 people/kmsq [37.7M/(8891*100)], which is like half that of Albania. Of course the true answer is that it is our bad influence is seeping up across the boarder. Have you heard of Comcast?
  - post-it 5y ago
shp0ngle 5y ago
You would not believe how connected to the internet people from middle income and low income countries are. Everyone has internet. No, it’s mostly that phones are more convenient/cheap than computers. Everyone just has a cheap smartphone, computer feels redundant and expensive for what it can do. And computers are too expensive for educational segment.

a9h74j 5y ago

Provocatively, imagine if had been one Emacs per child. With EXWM. (Actually, I was recently surprised to find that after an apt-get install on a chromebook, Emacs started up in full gui mode.)

zozbot234 5y ago
AIUI, the basic architecture of the "Sugar" environment is quite Emacs-like, though not literally built on Emacs. That's why they thought it would be important to have a "view source" feature.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]