A year ago, in a galaxy far away#

The past year has been full of difficult changes that have led radical changes in my career, my mental health, and my understanding of technology.

Around mid 2025, after getting fired from my 3rd IT job in two years, I decided that “the game ain’t in me no more” and I retired early. Unfortunately, age 52 is too old to go back to school, and too young for social security. I worked in IT for about 28 years, give or take. I wasn’t in to computers as a kid, I discovered them when I was in the military, where I achieved a kind of respect for knowing not just how to use a computer, but also how to repair, program, and hack one. So I decided to go back to military roots and drive trucks again. School buses specifically.

The importance of a work PC#

One thing that I didn’t realize is how important a work PC is to my personal projects. The workstation is a discipline. I can’t take too many risks with it. In a career spent wiping systems and restoring them, the personal workstation is a thing to be repaired. It’s more than a pet, it’s a companion. There is also something about having access to a computer that is always on, always functioning, and just slightly out of reach. Not just the computer, but a desk as well. I always had a place to work that is mine, away from home. Quitting my office job meant losing access to a work PC, and a place where the family can leave me alone to ditch work to do my own thing.

My IT career always revolved around Windows. I have used Linux for decades, but it was almost exclusively for servers. At home, my primary computing function was playing video games, which for years also meant Windows. About 6 months ago, I moved my gaming laptop to Nobara Linux, and I realized that I no longer needed Windows for anything.

The rediscovery of the Chromebook#

I have worked for a university before, but never a public school system. I have also worked for industrial organizations where the PC isn’t quite as personal as it is on the corporate side. At the university, I supported the administrative staff, students. It occurred to me that the public school student PC is more akin to an industrial workstation than an office PC, only portable. Somehow less personal in terms of installed applications, and more personal since everything is done on a cloud work-spaces like Google.

When I was a university student, I had a cheap netbook. It was small, not very powerful, and I mostly took notes and used Google apps like Gmail and Docs, as well as school applications like Blackboard. Toward the end of my time as a student, the netbook as computing platform went extinct; it was displaced by the tablet and the Chromebook. The tablet is more like a smartphone than a PC, which in my opinion is far more personal than the PC. I had an early model of the Samsung Chromebook that I used when I traveled to dangerous places like DefCon. This was back when Google believed in “don’t be evil” and big tech was far less political (and far less right wing) than it is today.

The school laptop is a different animal than a corporate laptop. It has to be portable and have battery life that is similar to a smartphone. School technology is paradoxically high-tech and also very low tech, it really is fascinating. In a corporate setting, a single purpose computer would probably be a thin client or a self-service kiosk.

A public school Chromebook is kind of like a kiosk that you take home. Because the client application for most school work is a web browser, the central computing model doesn’t actually work, in my opinion. The system resource footprint of a modern browser is vastly unpredictable. A relatively flat website like a banking portal could be open in one tab, while another tab could be streaming 4k video. Applications like word processors and spreadsheets are fairly predictable, web browsers are anything but.

So the Chromebook is a thin client, but it runs the browser app locally. A virtual desktop environment that reserved 2 CPU cores and 4GB of RAM per user would be unimaginably expensive. I don’t mean cores and RAM for x number of concurrent users, I mean cores and RAM reserved for every registered user. Over-subscription is part of the thin client model, hoping that not all of the users are logged in concurrently.

Seeing the Chromebook in its natural habitat among students feels like discovering a new (to me) species, like a platypus. Only instead of a mammal that lays eggs, it’s like a kiosk for one person, a purpose built general purpose computer, or maybe a really smart dumb terminal.

What it all means#

Driving a school bus means that I have hours in the middle of the day when I am at work, but not working. This is prime time for me to work on my writing and my home lab. For a while I used my iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard. In some ways that made sense. Even a 7-year-old iPad like mine has superior battery life compared to a laptop, and an iPad in and Otterbox case is way tougher than a cheap laptop.

Trouble is, my iPad lacks a real command line and moving files around on it is a pain. Occasionally, I use Blink, a Raspberry Pi, and a portable battery bank to add a legitimate command line to my iPad. That’s a lot of little devices to set up and take down every morning. The Pi and the battery can be replaced with Headscale and a Linux VM, or just a shell account on a public access Unix system. That solves the “too many devices” problem, but it doesn’t change the fact that while my iPad is old, it’s still fairly valuable. Plus I need it for my “big smartphone that I use in bed or on the couch” function. I always discover that I have left my messenger bag in the car after I sit down on the couch. Leaving my iPad at work would be a toaster-bath level error.

Which brings me back to the Chromebook. Not just any model, a rubberized model meant for grade school students. It’s not Panasonic Toughbook tough, but it’s also not Toughbook expensive. I found an Acer C771 on Ebay for about $60 shipped. The only problem with the Chromebook is that it’s, well, a Chromebook.

Flashing Firmware#

Which is where I discovered Mr Chromebox, which is a tool for replacing ChromeOS on x86 devices with Linux via coreboot. The flashing process is a bit nerve-wracking, but largely straight forward. You open the laptop, remove a screw that controls the read/write state of the firmware, and then you put the laptop in developer mode to overwrite the firmware. I would put it at about the same hassle as flashing an Android phone to LineageOS. An hours long project, but not a whole weekend.

I have been fiddling with different Linux distros to find the right mix of features that I like. I think I have settled on Ubuntu Mate. The Linux distro doesn’t really matter. With coreboot in place, you can install anything, even Windows.

The Good#

The good is having an 11-inch laptop that is sturdier than my old netbook, with battery life that rivals my iPad, that I can charge anywhere thanks to USB C. If I didn’t already have an Evolve Maestro running 73 Linux, I would recommend a student Chromebook flashed to run it for field radio operations. I wouldn’t use a Chromebook in the pouring rain, but between the low price tag and the rubberized corners, I feel fine putting it in my messenger bag with no sleeve or padded laptop compartment.

One advantage that the Acer has is a full-sized HDMI, not some weird micro/mini HDMI like the Evolve or the Raspberry Pi 4/5.

The Bad#

Compared to a proper office laptop like a Latitude or ThinkPad, a Chromebook is under-powered and the keyboard and touchpad suck. The keyboard feels fine to type on, not as great as a ThinkPad, but definitely better than the Evolve. The trouble is that there are no home, end or delete keys. The touchpad is larger than I am used to, it’s more sensitive, and has no right or left mouse buttons. I think this design is meant to bridge Mac and Windows users, but I am not sure.

A strange quirk of my nervous system is that I am left-handed, but I use a mouse with my right hand (a product of years spent sitting at other people’s computers), but a laptop touch pad with my left, where I click the buttons with my thumb. On a Chromebook, you have to tap with one finger for left click and two fingers for right. If I want to use my thumb to right-click, I need to click far to the lower right of the touch pad. Now that I only work on computers that belong to me, maybe I can go back to using a mouse left-handed.

In terms of IO ports, mine has 2 USB3 ports and an HDMI port. No Ethernet, and the audio doesn’t work out of the box on Linux, or maybe the 771 just doesn’t have speakers. I haven’t tried any Bluetooth audio yet.

Conclusion#

For a 7-year-old laptop that was $60 shipped, it’s a decent machine. In an age where a 7 year old MacBook is still $500, the cracked Chromebook is amazing. Taking it apart to remove the read/write screw was kind of scary, but it wasn’t the first time I got a new (to me) laptop and immediately took it apart. The keyboard sucks, but the battery life is excellent. I don’t recommend it as a full-time daily driver, more like a beater for communing to work. It’s fine for writing and light coding. I wouldn’t compile anything with it, but it does make a passable writing workstation.

The Platypus PC is a fascinating thought experiment. I am intrigued by the idea of a “take home kiosk”. I am imagining an organization with a lot of employees and little IT support, such as a nonprofit or a small business with mostly field technicians, sales, or remote workers. In that setting, I think a low powered PC desktop or laptop that is essentially a kiosk for the company Intranet would fill the gap left between a thin client desktop and a tablet. Like a tablet, the data would live in the cloud, but the applications would run locally like a PC. I am imagining an embedded-style operating system, immutable with a small overlay for necessary data like WiFi credentials, TLS certs, and unique system identifiers. Persistent user data stays in the cloud behind TLS and Two-Factor Authentication. It would run Linux with little, if anything configured by the user, like the super boring Unix+CDE workstations from the 90s where everything looked and acted the same.