this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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It's actually crazy, that we live in a world, where a computer that was mid to high-end 4 years ago, can be called obsolete now, because... windows 11 says it is? It doesn't make any fucking sense. All just to attempt to gaslight people into using secureboot
It's also pretty awesome that nowadays 4, 5, or even 10 year old computers are still totally viable to use for most use-cases, which would've been unheard of back in the 80's and 90's when hardware had such giant leaps in speed every few years. I'm loving that we finally have some longevity with hardware, and that Linux is able to actually extract that longevity from the hardware in spite of Microsoft's efforts to cut it short.
my thinkpad t420 is still going strong today :)
I have a 14 year old laptop running Linux Mint that I use daily. Sure, it's had the HD and the battery replaced, but it's still fine for most tasks. An SSD really improved performance.
My Thinkpad will turn 15 next year. It will probably be retired as my main laptop, but it will keep in bring useful in some fashion for a while still running Fedora.
Nice. Fedora is pretty damn polished
I can confirm the longevity part from own experience.
I bought several used Dell Wyse 5070. The 5070 was announced in May 2018 and used as thin client.
They're tiny, silent and you can fit a NVMe SSD via adapter in the WiFi card slot next to a SATA SSD. I picked the ones with Intel Celeron J4105 (Quad Core) with 1.5GHz, up to 2.5GHz burst and put 32 GB RAM in one of them.
Now I have a PVE (Proxmox Virtual Environment) running with several virtual servers, one 5070 hosts a PBS (Proxmox Backup Server) and both devices are far from their limit. In case of hardware failure I have spare 5070s.
Each 5070 cost around $65 and runs at around 8 watts at average.
It fits my needs and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Sysadmin here. Much of the attitude is baked into old guys like me who remember PCs getting blown out by the next gen, which came 6-months later.
At my last job, it wasn't so much the aging tech as people beating the shit out of their laptops. Users treated them as disposable at that place. We made fat money as a small software dev, no one questioned buying new gear every 2-3 years. I was fucking appalled.
One of the biggest downsides of the fact that my social circle is mostly techies is that I can no longer get free 3-4 year old "junk" computers.
Closer to 7 years for the newest unsupported machines.
And just because somethings obsolete doesn't mean it's unusable. Your CPU is probably considered obsolete and not getting security patches, but I bet you're still using it.
We've seen W11 be installed on one of the first ever x86_64 machines with enough success. Obviously there are missing cpu instructions, but the majority of requirements differences between 10 and 11 are just bs, and an attempt at forced obsolescence