I would never use a Chromebook, but this is extremely appealing either way. I wonder if their other hardware and operating systems will receive this kind of support eventually.
No operating system gets updates forever, no software package gets updates forever, no hardware gets firmware updates forever, and there's no such thing as a standard computer. But other than that you're right.
Chromebooks are popular in schools because of ease of use and ease of device management. Suggesting school districts with thousands of students deploy and manage linux students is asinine.
Not really. Not once you get the primitives nailed down, and your network architecture/endpoint management sorted.
In fact, most of the biggest things holding back Linux in schools is the lack of a multi-billion dollar corporation extprting enough money that after the "student and educational discount version" is released and a few paltry assurances by a salesman that support will be a thing that school administrators are fine with provisioning networks of it.
Novell, contrary to popular belief, exists, and works just fine with Linux, windows, and Mac. Lets you use your own servers and cloud infra and everything. Novell itself is just a bunch of effort put into migration scripts, some custom OpenLDAP schemas, a few augmented endpoint agents/pieces of groupware, and the ever important to the Enterprise license management framework.
And for a Chromebook to be supported by Google means that exactly the same device runs in some Lab and every ChromeOS update gets regression tested against it before going live. That's a big difference to "just install Linux".
However, Chromebooks supposedly come with well-tested Linux support.
If this is a guarantee that the drivers will get security updates for 10 years and be mainlined into the linux kernel (and if there is a way to get these things with a normal keyboard and BIOS), then this is great news.
I'd never run ChromeOS, but would happily buy a flagship-grade laptop that lived up to the expectations in the previous paragraph (and then run Linux or even BSD on it).
Why BIOS (did you mean UEFI?) when it runs the best boot loader, which is Coreboot¹. Many users would love to re-flash their bios/uefi for it, if it’s supported.
Quite the opposite, they're quite adamant about only using free (as in freedom) and in this case, beer, software. And denounce the usage of VPNs at every opportunity. ;)
So they really want you to use Tor - where the fact that you are connecting to a Tor node is extremely obvious, and flags you as a being part of the fractional percentage of internet users who do so - but don't want you to use a VPN, the use of which, while still not exactly baseline, is increasingly common? That may give you privacy, but it hardly seems like it makes you anonymous. Rather, wouldn't that send up a giant beacon for anyone at your ISP who cares to look at connections they (or the authorities) might want to pay more attention to?
> where the fact that you are connecting to a Tor node is extremely obvious
Yes, additionally, it has been concluded that it is impossible to hide the usage of Tor from the ISP, VPNs do not help. The usage of Tor is obvious.
> but don't want you to use a VPN
If you can't use Tor safely, it would be unlikely that you can use a VPN safely either.
> That may give you privacy, but it hardly seems like it makes you anonymous.
What makes you say that? There are millions of Tor users connected at any time, if you believe the number of users is an issue. I suggest you read more about Tor on their website - https://torproject.org
> Rather, wouldn't that send up a giant beacon for anyone at your ISP who cares to look at connections they (or the authorities) might want to pay more attention to?
No, I don't believe so granted that you live in a western democracy.
The Tails team made the fantastic decision of modifying the Tor Browser, giving Tails users a unique fingerprint as opposed to regular Tor Browser users.
> and that now I2Pnis the preferred method of browsing the darknet
This is not true by any means. A "switch" to I2P never happened, and just a few months ago an exploit[1] that could deanonymize eepsites was published. Tor is still the only "method of browsing the darknet"; by most definitions.
On the page that OP linked to, there's statements such as:
"The Everything Tor OS - All traffic is routed through the Tor anonymity network. No exceptions. Whonix is the "All Tor Operating System"."
"Cloaking your typing style - Your typing behavior can be used to identify you. Whonix prevents this with a cloak for your keystrokes."
"Live Mode - Whonix offers a much requested Live Mode. After the session all data will be gone."
So I don't get your point. Of course if you want to know how, in detail, you have to read the documentation.
https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Documentation