I realize this does nothing to solve your problem, but for the sake of discusion, internally at Microsoft, pretty much all the developers I know have switched to using "Devbox", which means we use a remote desktop client to access our dev machine.

A lot of us resisted this at first, but then just kindof came to accept it, and it made it so we have a lot more capable machines to do development on than the laptops that we would have to recycle every couple years.

I know there have probably been a lot of "thin client" products/services in the education space in the past, but I think it might be time to try again.

Like another poster here, I think it's "sad" that kids are using laptops. Laptops have small screens and poor ergonomics.

A thin client setup with a good keyboard, mouse and monitor could be better and more affordable / future proof.

>Laptops have small screens and poor ergonomics.

This is a huge gripe of me and my wife. Growing up we all had desktops in the computer lab at school (elementary+) and you had decent size screens. Now kids pull up their little 12" chromebook in their classroom. Kids have eye strains, myopia etc...

Chromebooks are thin clients of sorts, its a web browser rendering google docs locally.

If anything is making them slow its the javascript bloat of modern webapps that could be doing more serverside.

Devbox seems to be semi-public, and/or offered to customers: https://devbox.microsoft.com/

Curious if there's a way random people can test it.

Of course they switched to devbox which is nothing more than azure virtual desktop with some added bells and whistles... also has the nice side effect that it's a subscription. Nice for microsoft at least, less for the consumer.

You don’t have to recycle laptops every few years. That’s a sandy foundation to build the rest of that “came to accept it” on. You weren’t just made to do it and retconned justification for compliance?

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