From what I can gather, a public school is likely to provide a student with a Chromebook PC, and they will have to use that for their computing needs. In my opinion, ChromeOS is not much better than a web browser, and can not be used to do actual work in. Yes, there is Google Drive, and Google’s office suite online, but this too is limiting. If a regular OS? was used, the computer is likely to be old, and not really functional. In either case, the student can not be productive with the machine.
Low income primary school students living in Allegheny County will be able to enter a free lottery to acquire a brand new laptop. The laptop will be the LA Series which includes a mid-range AMD CPU, and integrated GPU. The system will provide for 16GB of memory which will be more than enough for Rational OS, or most other Linux Distributions. The system will have a 256GB drive for their OS, and applications as well as a 512GB drive for their personal files. Since the memory, and storage is integrated into the system, they will take less space on the motherboard. The system will come with an installation thumb drive for the computer. This will allow them to try other OSes if they wish, and can go back to Rational OS if they decide it’s the best OS for them.