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M1m1c | 3 years ago

I relate to this. As someone currently in high school, messing around with web proxies and code deployment sights, and web-based IDE's trying to run Dwarf Fortress in my school browser has taught me more about computers and networks then just about anything else. It is painfully easy to get around school filters these days. I've never really messed with unenrollment because you do need enrollment to access the testing websites but I've been trying to get into Developer Mode to get linux apps, but the IT guys must have thought ahead on that one.

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westurner|3 years ago

Chromebooks don't even have a Terminal for the kids. Vim's great, but VScode with Jupyter Notebook support would make the computers we bought for them into great offline calculators, too.

VSCode on a Chromebook requires VMs and Containers which require "Developer Tools" and "Powerwash"; or the APK repack of VSCodium that you can't even sideload and manually update sometimes (because it's not on the 15-30% cut, and must use their payment solution, app store with static analysis and code signing at upload).

AFAIU, Chromebooks with Family Link and Chromebooks for Education do not have a Terminal, bash, git, VMs (KVM), Containers (Docker/Podman/LXC/LXD/gvisor), third-party repos with regular security updates, or even Python; which isn't really Linux (and Windows, Mac, and Linux do already at present support such STEM for Education use cases).

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30168491 :

> Is WebVM a potential solution to "JupyterLite doesn't have a bash/zsh shell"? The current pyodide CPython Jupyter kernel takes like ~25s to start at present, and can load Python packages precompiled to WASM or unmodified Python packages with micropip: https://pyodide.org/en/latest/usage/loading-packages.html#lo...

There's also MambaLite, which is part of the emscripten-forge project; along with BinderLite. https://github.com/emscripten-forge/recipes (Edit: Micropip or Mambalite or picomamba or Zig. : "A 116kb WASM of Blink that lets you run x86_64 Linux binaries in the browser" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376094 )

It looks like there are now tests for VScode in the default Power washable 'penguin' Debian VM that you get with Chromebook Developer Tools; but still the kids are denied VMs and Containers or local accounts (with kid-safe DoH/DoT at lesat) and so they can't run VScode locally on the Chromebooks that we bought for them.

Why do I need "Developer Tools" access to run VScode and containers on a Chromebook; but not on a Windows, Mac or Linux computer? If containers are good enough for our workloads hosted in the cloud, they should be good enough for local coding and calculating in e.g. Python. https://github.com/quobit/awesome-python-in-education#jupyte...

swhan|3 years ago

Good point. Wasn't aware of the Family Link restrictions. Will see what can be done here.

Disclaimer: I work on ChromeOS.

M1m1c|3 years ago

I actually use a Web Assembly port of VIM on my school computer.