[liberationtech] Chromebooks for Risky Situations?

[Andy Isaacson]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2013 at 10:52:23AM -0500, micah anderson wrote:
> > - ChromeOS's update mechanism is automatic, transparent, and basically
> > foolproof.  Having bricked Ubuntu and Gentoo systems, the same is not
> > true of Linux.
> 
> I would be surprised if you actually 'bricked' these systems, since
> neither operating system you mention involves a procedure that has the
> risk of bricking a device. I suspect this is hyperbole?

I've had dist-upgrade (or the GUI equivalent) make an Ubuntu system
unbootable and unrecoverable without recourse to a rescue-image and deep
magic grub hacking, etc.  That counts as "bricked" when the easiest
course of action is to simply reinstall the OS from scratch.  It's not
"bricked" in the sense that an Android install gone awry can require
specialized hardware (JTAG dongle etc) and crypto keys to fix, but it's
equivalent from a user's point of view.

-andy