Somewhat off topic: Whenever I see these user-friendly Linux distributions I think they would be great for mass deployments in schools or similar. Is there any technology that gives Elementary (or similar distributions) a deployment workflow like Chrome OS; ie zero-config (for the user) to log into a central service and configuration of the user account while being easy to administer?
I've got some thoughts on this. I've found that there are two approaches to centralised management of computers: Installing a pre-made all-in-one product with pre-programmed configuration options (Windows with mostly AD, GPOs) and having numerous automatable components that can be stitched together with scripts (UNIX, sometimes Windows with Powershell). I prefer the scripting approach, as it gives me much more flexibility beyond one vendor's products. The scripts can also be shared, just now I'm setting up a second "home" server and I can mostly copy-paste Ansible roles from the first. So a school admin who's somewhat familiar with Linux could start with a complete template. The problem is that familiarity with Linux, some people will run at first sight of scripting.
The other problem is that I don't think there's money in developing a shiny boxed solution with marketing. Schools mostly go to Linux for cost savings, you couldn't convince them to pay enough to cover all the expenses of a SW company. A "support group" of school admins that administer Linux desktops might, though, which is where the script-sharing could come in. Less shiny, less "just buy it and we're done", but more likely in my opinion.
I agree about the two paths and I share a preference for the non-vendor one. Yet at the very least I need an OS that out of the box accepts say an email user@org.tld as username and automatically contacts org‘s directory to check for authorisation and pull email credentials at the very least. This seems so basic to me that it should exist outside of commercial solutions.
Well, there is FreeIPA, best compared to AD, but it's still much more complicated than what Chrome OS offers. I agree something as zero-setup would be great.
Then there's Canonical recent announcement that Ubuntu will support group policies via active directory - which will probably bleed into other Debian/Ubuntu derivatives.
