But meanwhile lose all credibility. If you don't want to commit to a specific piece of hardware, don't sell it. A $5000 whiteboard with a $600 yearly subscription AND that requires paid Google workspace subscriptions for each user (100 employees=$12000 each year) will NEVER be ultra popular. They already knew from the beginning that they wouldn't be possibly move millions of units of this and they would just cash in from the subscriptions.
All files generated on this devices are proprietary and saved on their servers. As of now, it's not possible to get them and open on a computer. When they pull the plug, they're all gone.
Maybe the new management kept some of the boards, but here they spent half million in hardware + 60k yearly for the software licenses + another hundreds of thousands for the required Google workspace accounts for the users. And for what? For e-waste that ends with no drop-in replacement. Now corps need to quickly find an alternative and they need to pay extra to convert the generated files to the new platform.
Behaving like this will definitely hurt future sales, as Google will be labeled as the supplier that suddenly disappears without a drop-in replacement.
There are a lot of other companies that discontinue and render the purchased hardware a brick within a short timeframe, for example Cisco, but at least they have an upgrade path and not "we exit the market, good luck".
They call them surveys but at the end of the 100 fake questions they ask a credit card for "verification" - at that point you're silently forwarded to a different website where you subscribe to a scam service at 49 euro / month with a 7 day trial for 1 euro. This fine print is written in grey on a grey background, the victim at this point is tired to read from the 100s of fake questions and just says yes to everything. Chrome credit card auto fill helps the process by requiring just one extra click instead of typing the numbers. The user just want that manual/game/document and ran out of patience from fake countdowns and fake loading bars "checking if the file is available"
The purpose is to trick the user in to clicking the fake link and waste 5 euro for the fake "survey" with those fake waits and fake countdowns leading ultimately to an error 404
I agree that there should be an easy setting to at least allow updates without password. I installed Manjaro for my mom, after a while she complained "there are updates every day and I need to input the password too many times"
There's no official installer for steamos, only a recovery image for the steam deck. Then, some people in their free time hacked that image to allow installing on other hardware (except Nvidia GPUs) but imho not very easy
Actually, the guide doesn't mention how to dual boot, it's how to install Linux bare metal as the only os.
Otherwise they wouldn't have removed the possibility to easily boot Linux from the windows boot manager instead of grub