Many schools in the US provide their students with laptops and Chromebook is the overwhelming favorite. The student has to return the laptop at the end of the year. As an anecdote, I know of no one who bought a Chromebook for personal use. My friends, colleagues and acquaintances are buying Macs or Windows machines if they want a laptop, iPads or Android tablets if they just want a tablet.

In a way, Google's strategy of getting Chromebooks into schools may have backfired as they're largely seen as kids' computers.

> Is this a US thing where your school buys you a laptop?

It is a thing that is essentially an equivalent of an employer-provided work laptop, but for students and provided by their school.

I’ve never even seen a Chromebook in real life here in Australia. I’m sure they must exist but I’ve never heard of anyone using one.

They are in use by the millions in schools. I have one and I really like, can run android apps, chrome web browser, and in the crostini linux system I can run any apps, dev tools, web browsers, emacs, and it is native. I like it better than raw linux because of the built in android support.

I gave chromeos laptops to my family because they aren't trustworthy. Now they have reliable laptops and don't get virus infections or os problems.

Yeah ok interesting! Makes sense for the Linux parts - not sure I’d trust Google with my family’s data but that doesn’t mean they’re not useful.

That's a complicated story. No one really wants surveillance capitalism. I don't think google copies what I'm doing on my chromebook, but almost every website has google tracking. Chrome has google tracking. You can use non-chrome browsers on chrome os, they are all there via the linux subsystem. You can also run the android ones.