Replying to Avatar Tobias Bernard

nostr:npub12f7r2gjj0ch84wdh5kg03gkmjyskya6zlxq70cxlk5qm5sysjhuq08lkxh I wonder if there's a way to buy up three year old unsupported devices at scale and re-flash them with real GNU/Linux 🤔

That way you could both prolong the lifespan of the devices and make them more useful for kids.

nostr:npub1d76s7zapvltswuyrayjk9kwey4jqkja0frtkfxkarszf0fykjzwq93897u unfortunately it’s SUPER dependent on the specific hardware and oftentimes the bootloaders are locked down. I believe it’s similar to the state of Android phones where a few with unlockable bootloaders exist, but the vast majority require an exploit if they can be reflashed at all.

This is where I feel like Right to Repair regulation should require reflashability at least after the EOL date, but also I feel like congresspeople would not understand the concept at all…

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nostr:npub12f7r2gjj0ch84wdh5kg03gkmjyskya6zlxq70cxlk5qm5sysjhuq08lkxh Wow, that's so fucked.

That said, given the size of some deployments you'd maybe only need one device to be unlocked/exploitable/hardware enabled. If you can get 10k units from one source maybe that's all you need, and it'd be worth the work on the software side 🤔