Google, digital management systems
One of the things Google has built is the same sort of corporate perimeter and digital management system that you typically find at large tech companies.
This shouldn't be surprising, but I only know about this system because Google offers their system to customers (I have no association with Google, other than being a customer).
More specifically, Google offers this product to children: as a parental control framework for Android and in the classroom.
Google, digital management systems
Chromebooks in particular are a "from the ground up" implementation of this system. They're locked into using it and rely on Google for everything.
This is probably the main reason Chromebooks are so popular in US schools, Google has already done all the work required to lock down these systems as much as possible, so that even someone with physical access will have difficulty hacking into it and taking control of the computer system.
Google, digital management
I consider this system highly dystopian on a number of levels, so I have mixed feelings about how convenient it has been as the parent of a toddler.
Unfettered access isn't really an option and I don't really have the time to build and manage something like this locally and even if I did, it would be easy to hack with physical access.
In a few years, by the time he's ready to move on to a real computer, I'll definitely be using Linux, but for now it's filling a need.
Google, digital management
@urusan In general, I find that authoritarianism you can opt-in to is pretty great, actually. One can argue it's a major driver of the popularity of the Apple ecosystem as well: "You can run this software on any computer you want... As long as we made the chips, and the chassis, and the OS."
... and as a result, there's a whole *category* of compatibility woes that Mac users just never run into. Apple's OpenGL stack was, for the longest time, the only OpenGL implementation I could trust because they'd wrapped OpenGL in their own compatibility layer and made vendors code to that layer (or get out of the pool). Hard on card vendors, *amazing* for end-users.
And Chromebook is the platform I recommend for my elderly relatives now because it's nearly impossible to entice them to sneak malware onto it, since Google controls the OS and the extension store.
Sometimes, freedom makes people's lives harder. In the extreme, maximal freedom is foregoing society to go live in the woods, and it turns out that'd kill most people. ;)
Google, digital management
@mtomczak The grandparents that don't know what the heck they're doing use case was how I got to know Chromebooks.
One of the adult children (in-laws) of these grandparents was already running their computer on Linux and it was a maintenance nightmare. Windows would have been even worse because navigating to the sketchiest possible websites and getting viruses was a major part of the problem.
Switching them to Chromebooks fixed the whole issue.