I would never use a Chromebook, but this is extremely appealing either way. I wonder if their other hardware and operating systems will receive this kind of support eventually.
No operating system gets updates forever, no software package gets updates forever, no hardware gets firmware updates forever, and there's no such thing as a standard computer. But other than that you're right.
Chromebooks are popular in schools because of ease of use and ease of device management. Suggesting school districts with thousands of students deploy and manage linux students is asinine.
Not really. Not once you get the primitives nailed down, and your network architecture/endpoint management sorted.
In fact, most of the biggest things holding back Linux in schools is the lack of a multi-billion dollar corporation extprting enough money that after the "student and educational discount version" is released and a few paltry assurances by a salesman that support will be a thing that school administrators are fine with provisioning networks of it.
Novell, contrary to popular belief, exists, and works just fine with Linux, windows, and Mac. Lets you use your own servers and cloud infra and everything. Novell itself is just a bunch of effort put into migration scripts, some custom OpenLDAP schemas, a few augmented endpoint agents/pieces of groupware, and the ever important to the Enterprise license management framework.
And for a Chromebook to be supported by Google means that exactly the same device runs in some Lab and every ChromeOS update gets regression tested against it before going live. That's a big difference to "just install Linux".
However, Chromebooks supposedly come with well-tested Linux support.
If this is a guarantee that the drivers will get security updates for 10 years and be mainlined into the linux kernel (and if there is a way to get these things with a normal keyboard and BIOS), then this is great news.
I'd never run ChromeOS, but would happily buy a flagship-grade laptop that lived up to the expectations in the previous paragraph (and then run Linux or even BSD on it).
Why BIOS (did you mean UEFI?) when it runs the best boot loader, which is Coreboot¹. Many users would love to re-flash their bios/uefi for it, if it’s supported.
