What? Donβt look at me like that! I totally need 70 computers! Yes theyβre useful! They all have their purpose! That one? Its job is to be force-fed whatever weird obscure Linux distribution I just heard of! Oh, that one? Thatβs for testing Arch Linux configs on 25 year old hardware!
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My problem is that because of Linux I can almost never throw away an old computer. I've got a bloody netbook around here somewhere running Lubuntu.
I had to accept a few years back that my venerable eeePC 1000 netbook with it's single core (2 threads!) Atom CPU is just not useful any longer, even with the most lightweight distro.
I'll never let that particular machine go though, because it means a lot to me. I bought it with my first paycheck from my first job after university, and the year after (as the only portable machine I owned) it saw me through a whole year working abroad. Managed everything from Skype calls with my parents to browsing the Internet and watching YouTube, and that was running Windows!
Trying to do something with it now is just a reminder of how outrageously bloated and resource-heavy modern apps have become, especially those that are just electron web wrappers. And the web itself is exponentially more demanding to render.
It's not your fault little eee, you're just the same as ever. It's the world that changed.
I suppose I could use it as an IRC terminal or something, that would be pretty hipster. But I'd just be wasting electricity.
That brings back memories. I had an eeePC back in the day also! A fine little portable machine in it's time. But yes, time passed it by. I've got 2 old 16" laptops sitting on a shelf that no longer power on at all. And 2 old Chrome books that still light up. I should really do something with those I suppose.
My current fascination is mini desktops. I have an N100 mini with 8gigs of shared memory. It came with Win10 on it but that only lasted until I wiped it and did a bit distro surfing before settling on Fedora 41 Cinnamon. As a student/lite office machine that only cost me $90US from amazon, (I had an unused HDMI monitor), it's amazingly sturdy to use. I want a bit better one now......
They are bloody spectacular for programming arduino or flashing your 3D printer.
I started my Linux journey as a poor high school college student and while I got hand-me-down windows machines at home, I worried about breaking them fiddling with things beyond my knowledge level. A budget basement eeePC became my workbench and I started tinkering. I had to drive to the next city to find one in stock. Today the gas would cost more than the computer. :-D
I'd still be running the eee but it got put in the closet when many distros dropped 32 bit support.
Could set it up as a fileserver
I could :)
But these days I have actual servers to do server things (2x HP Gen 8 Microservers which I saved from e-waste) so my little eee is kept only for love and nostalgia.
Hot take
If the world was running on GNU/Linux for endpoints, tech-normies would still be using computers from 2010. And this would cut massively into laptop OEM's bottom line. Therefore I think it's a quiet conspiracy where laptop manufacturers or the computer OEMs shut up about Windows being bad because just imagine if everyone would be running GNU/Linux. You could use laptops from 2010 with "regular" distros and be completely fine. With light distros you could use things from the 1990's for all tech normie tasks, web-browsing, text editing, e-mail, etc.
TLDR: Microshit Windows bad.
While I do agree that the Windows upgrade circle is vicious and manufacturers benefit from it every time they sell a new machine. It's not the whole problem Linux needs to over come.
There is an incredibly large amount of sheer inertia that needs to be overcome. And that's a lot harder to to break than the upgrade cycle because users don't like change. It's like a huge boulder rolling down a mountain. And while you can see little pieces of it chip off now and then. It's due to the sheer size of that boulder that it ain't stopping anytime soon.
It's going to a lot longer before the "Year of Linux" ever happens.
Before the arbitrary Windows 11 hardware restrictions, this was exactly what was happening on the Windows side as well. There are still tons of 10-15yo Windows devices around, happily running Win10.
"Regular" people also only upgrade their PC once the old one breaks or if they really encounter something that doesn't work on the old PC (mostly games if they do play somewhat modern games).
In fact, Windows used to have really awesome long-term-support and forever long upgrade support. You can easily run Win10 on a quality high-performance PC from 2008. But with Win11, they just tossed all that in the drain.
In that thought experiment there are more scenarios. Remembering that stepping on a butterfly can change... This is, small input changes can have big repercussions down the line.
You cannot assume what Linux would be in that scenario.
Who knows if it would have been colored by a main corporation.
Capitalism would have found a way to leverage it and new computers would be sold.
Madness? Buying a new computer every 2 years because the OS vendor is in cahoots with hardware manufacturers is madness. This is rational usage of resources for your benefit.
OS vendor is in cahoots with hardware manufacturers
That's pretty much the strategy since Microsoft has been established. It's not very creative, it's not even legal, so it's impressive (in a bad way) that they manage to keep on making it work.
My go to for reliable Linux platforms is anything off-lease. Workstation class systems are extremely robust most of the time. I have some that have been in 24/7 operation since I bought them years ago and they're showing zero signs of slowing down. I love it.
Ewaste is also a good place to look for still good but deemed unworthy of use by a faceless, soulless corporation stuff. Usually tends to be a bit older, but it's usually fine.
Have fun friends, there's no wrong answers.
Have fun friends, there's no wrong answers.
Sadly, there is though: as nice and fascinating as it is to get a usable computer out of vintage hardware - sometimes the power consumption is too bad to justify not recycling the hardware :(
This is a completely valid concern. I recently moved my homelab from core 2 era xeons (not second Gen core i-series... Core2), over to Xeon E5 v4 processors. I looked today and the systems take about the same amount of power, but now instead of six cores, I have 10, and they're newer, faster in every way...
Power draw didn't change but now I can run something like 3-4x the workloads, which means I can cut the size by 1/3rd and I would drop power consumption and gain more computing power.
There is absolutely a limit to what's useful. You won't find anyone running a Pentium 3 anymore, even with Linux. It's just not sensible.
I'd argue that anything core i-series 4th Gen or older, probably needs to be decommissioned soon, if not already. Most of the workloads that you could use that stuff for can easily be handled by a raspberry Pi, which will use less than 1/10th the power to do it.
Basically, if what you're doing can be 100% completed in whole on a pi, either you need to upgrade, or simply move it to a pi. Simple as that. Anything else is just burning power and heating your home with little benefit.
Exactly this, I got a gaming tower for free from a Friend featuring a nvidia gtx 980 and learned a short time ago, that my new m4pro laptop has nearly 5x gpu power for a fraction of electricity power needed in comparison
Buy e-waste? I have people give it to me for free. Offer to recycle it for them.
The classic
offers to recycle
actually installs esoteric Linux distros
Classic!
Yeah this is basically what I do. People like giving me their stuff because I'm transparent about the deal:
- If at all possible, I will wipe it for you.
- If it's usable, I will either add it to my TrashCloudβ’ or (especially for laptops) set it up for a kid.
- Parts/devices that I cannot get working I will take to electronics recycling.
- No iPhones/iPads.
"What do you mean, 'Why do I need that stack of old ThinkPads?'. They were free!"
Who needs virtual machines when I can just use a separate device for every distro I want to try?
Very true. Also, redundancy
Why would I need an enterprise router if I can have a superfast, very extendable, very flexible and redundant router with two old desktop machines?
if the stack of shit laptops were dirt cheap or even free, and you are having fun tinkering with them...its still better than letting them rot in the soil.
Windows: creates e-waste
Linux: undoes e-waste
Windows: creates e-waste
Linux: collects e-waste under the stairs "just in case it's useful"
The dump I go to every week to drop off my household garbage has an e waste shed. The guys that work there told me I can pick through it. My basement is a pc graveyard now.
At my dump, you get weighed on the way in and out and you pay for the weight you drop. So, if you leave your garbage and load up some ewaste, it saves you money. They are literally paying you to take it away.
This is the life I want for myself.
There's about to be a lot more surplus hardware since Microsoft arbitrarily decided they can't update to Windows 11.
And real good specs on most those machines, most will be at least DDR4 some even DDR5
My mom's laptop self "upgraded" to win 11 a while back and she hates it and has been having issues nonstop. And since she refuses to pay a monthly subscription for office I set her up with Libre office. She's been resistant to Linux but as I slowly add more FOSS apps she's coming around. She's now willing to try a Linux Mint live USB.
I'm going to be on the lookout for one of these perfectly good laptops and throw Mint on it for her so she can keep her windows laptop until she's ready to fully make the switch.
Getting visibly annoyed whe you find out you can't easily run mainline linux on some proprietary piece of hardware like a phone or smart TV.
But hey at least my robot vacuum runs on Ubuntu by default lol.
It's been a couple of weeks since i switched to mint and gotta tell you that this is very tempting
Those images are in the wrong direction.
If you can believe it, there are some people who will straight up give you their e-waste, as if it's trash or something!
Shouldn't the images be in reverse order?
It's reducing e-waste and using older tech for something atleast, both of which would normally wouldn't happen
I started at the bottom with ewaste, it is truly amazing what companies will just throw away because they don't want to deal with it.
I am really looking forward to picking up some cheap used mini PCs here in a few months after the market gets flooded from corporates disposing of their old hardware because of the Windows 10 end of life. Consumers have already started ditching them now, but it takes a minute for enterprise to get it to a disposal company who then gets to pawn it off on the used market and that's the good stuff.
Unless you have an Asus m32cd_a_f_k20cd_k31cd motherboard. I've tried EVERY bloody configuration in the bios possible and several different distros, and they all crash / freeze during installation. Fuck you Asus π€¬
Iβm pretty certain at this point that Iβm about to be forced to buy some programming socks.
Me, ~~fighting with~~ using an am5 chipset & nvidia graphics card for Wayland based distros because damn it, who needs a working machine anyway: "Heh, guess I'm not a clown"