My wife has asked me not to turn the house into a tech junkyard.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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
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.
It’s been a couple of weeks since i switched to mint and gotta tell you that this is very tempting
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
Exactly, not clownish at all.
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.
Me,
fighting withusing 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”Buy e-waste? I have people give it to me for free. Offer to recycle it for them.
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 TrashCloud™ 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.
Big thumbs up from me on the no iPhone/iPad policy.
That crap is ewaste as soon as Apple inc, decides it’s not worth supporting anymore with no option to load a different OS on it. Arguably, it’s ewaste before that, but I digress.
It just sucks that the hardware is made specifically to be incapable of running anything but the OS or was built for, which is entirely controlled by a profit-driven company by way of closed source software.
Say all the bad things you want about them (I certainly do), but it’s hard to say that their hardware isn’t good. It’s just sabotaged at the factory by their firmware and OS, condemning it to a mediocre and finite existence.
It’s shocking how much corpos just ruin perfectly good electronics by making it busted from the factory
The classic
offers to recycle
actually installs esoteric Linux distros
Classic!
I have a laptop that I use regularly that I actually found at the recycle center when I dropped off some bottles. It is running Linux of course.
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”
All the computers living under the stairs are running some server function. 🤷♂️
They’re heating the room too so technically it’s a radiator with network attached storage!
SmArt RAdiAToR!!
That was literally a hostname I gave one box I had in my life
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.
I came here to discover why this tactics gets the full clown… yes… we must renew machines and THEN GIVE THEM AWAY.
Yeah I tend to archive hardware till I meet someone who needs a system then I try to put something together that meets their needs. Otherwise I mothball it till I have a hardware failure in one of my servers etc. Thankfully the systems I am taking are heading for a grinder somewhere and not being repurposed.
Exactly.
In the late zeroes, the local recycle place got a bunch of full monitors as a local business transitioned to flat screens. I grabbed about twelve of them, thinking I would be able to build machines for kids without computers. I placed three full systems before we moved and I sadly had to dump a slew of them because we didn’t have space in the moving truck. Learned my lesson.
I’ve started keeping a handful of cases and I test all the hardware, catalog it and then put it in totes layered with anti static bubble wrap. Works great for jamming a large density of hardware in a small space!
What’s the oldest?
So far 2008-2009. Waiting to find some quality beige cases lol
“What do you mean, ‘Why do I need that stack of old ThinkPads?’. They were free!”
I’d like to know where can i put my hand on a stack of free Thinkpads.
Who needs virtual machines when I can just use a separate device for every distro I want to try?
I had 11 OSes on a single laptop once, including a vestigial Vista partition that was barely hanging on
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?
Power efficiency.
that’s like stage 7-8, after an extremely high electric bill. Also about that time you consider moving to a colder climate so the electronics can just heat your house.
I kinda love it in winter mornings when I’m a bit chilly and then I kick off a big compile or play something and there is this lovely warmth flowing from my main desktop and then I make a big cup of chai.
and space savings and convenience.
Also: Openwrt is a kind of Linux. That can be useful sometimes, when I need 10 custom wifi routers…
Where are you all getting free thinkpads from?
We are trash pandas at your next companys trash bin. They follow like minions M$ directly into Win11 hell.
Make friends with your local IT guys. Thinkpads are less common these days, because they’re “Chinese”, so it is more common to find dells (which usually are worse in my experience).
Unrelated, but I just took apart my old IBM thinkpad from 2003/2004 to clean it up and get all nice and pretty for it’s last few years of updates. I also did my newer-ish HP laptop from 2016 at the same time.
The thinkpad was just beautifully laid out, with thought put into the placement of vents, heat sinks, heat generating components, alternative air pathways if the entire bottom was blocked, easy maintenance of components, etc.
The HP was …not. The weakest ass heat sink I’ve ever seen, miles away from the processor (no wonder it sounded like a wind tunnel when playing a youtube video). One intake vent where your thigh would be if in your lap and the exhaust right where your knee would be. Extra bonus was the placement of the CPU (running usually 80c+) is right above your junk, the vent being offset from the processor a smidge.
Granted I’m comparing enterprise vs consumer laptop in the days when there was a massive difference in quality between the two, but damn, this experience has me decided (again) that internal layout and design is just as important as specs, even more so if you need more powerful components.
I have a literal suitcase full if 4TB SAS drives. Because they were free and pretty much unused.
Fun fact: A pelicase of 37 3.5" drives is the max weight you’re allowed in a single checked piece with common airlines. I had to give three drives to the check in clerk.
Seed some of Anna’s archive’s torrents. You can help preserve all of humanity’s knowledge with those
And just think how quickly you can get them all up and running with NixOS! All those endless hours of learning finally put to good use!
Beats contributing to the documentation/wiki. /s
Who needs documentation? The code is self-documenting! The entire thing’s on GitHub, just check the issues to figure out what’s going on! Didn’t work? Sorry, the thing got broke a few months ago. Just go through the commit history and I’m sure you’ll be up and running in no time!
I’ve also made a module that fixes your specific issue and uploaded it to my self hosted gitlab instance. The server is down right now? Well, isn’t that better? Now you can make the thing yourself! Remember to upload your thing to your GitHub, name it something like “nixos” and never mention it anywhere.
What do you mean the entire thing broke a few months ago? It broke only weeks ago, NixOS has the freshest breakages in the linux ecosystem
Who cares if it breaks? You can always just boot a previous generation! Need to rebuild without the breakage? You surely must now how to add a package from an earlier commit via flakes by now, right?
I’m just waiting for the moment I can update my packages (when all the unstable builds get updated)
Just put my custom flake into your inputs! No, I won’t give ydu an example on how to integrate it into your config. The Flakes schema is an incredibly easy concept to grasp, after all. /s
You can vibe code your config so now you have no excuse
Well, if you can’t figure out how to integrate the flake in 30 seconds by month 6, you clearly have a skill issue. Or a “sleeping at night instead of writing nix” issue. Better use a noob-friendly distro like arch.
Seriously though, despite all the flaws, there is no other packaging system where I can as painlessly use random forks of packages. I absolutely love how I’m able to run gnome-mobile on my x64 tablet. True to the NixOS way, I found the overlay on someone’s GitHub, there were only the files, no further instructions.
I also have a USB with live debian at all times, because you never know when you stumble upon a thing that just can’t work with NixOS
I really dig it as well, but hoo boy: the documentation still is… incredibly rough.
I’ve spent several evenings now trying to set up the development environment for a python package with additional binary file requirements (model weights) that I want to be included in the package.
It kinda works now with pyproject-nix, but I can’t manage to get an editable devshell running. And now it needs to unpack the requs everytime. 🙄
You’d be a fool to leave them!
I mean if they’re free you can always sell them for cheap and feel good about making some money while reducing e-waste
Usually it’s more a give away after installing mint on them, but it’s better than genuinely just tossing them for stuff newer than 7-8th gen intel.
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.
My 1 dollar vacuum I got at a thrift store is still chugging somehow.
And Taco Bell drive thru, apparently
I
Fuck it, we ball
F
F
My vacuum proudly runs Valetudo!
Haha same! FIrst thing I did was make a soundpack and install oucher so it makes funny voicelines when it bumps into objects lol.
Only works for Roborock, right? Would love that for my bot, but it’s a Dreame.
Voice pack should work: https://github.com/Findus23/voice_pack_dreame
As for oucher, you’d probably have to write your own program or script depending on how Dreame’s bump works. For Roborock it watches a logfile for bumper events, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you can find something similar in Dreame or even something like /dev/sensor1 that you can poll.
I run a Windows 7 laptop and bought a PC at Value Village and maxed out the RAM thanks to Aliexpress. Junk FTW!!
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.
if you want a LOT of them, govdeals.com is a way to go. You might hate me for showing you that place. Its how I ended up with a great generator for my house as well as too many servers.
We need to do a group buy. I don’t want 62 laptops, but there might be 61 other people that want one more laptop…
I remember that site, looked into it a few years ago when I was buying in bulk to resale stuff on eBay. Thanks for the tip, but I’m really just looking for one laptop.
Everything I have with DDR5 is running Win11. I have some DDR3 machines on Win10 tho. And of course DDR4. Just in my house I have three pretty decent DDR4 gaming rigs with compatible CPUs, SSDs, and nice video cards 3070ti and 4070ti, but the motherboard isn’t up to spec. I don’t like Win11 anyway though. I’ll have to figure those out soon I guess.
just start spinning up liveUSBs and trying distros out. I have my partner on Nobara and they seem to like it and it rolls in fast game fixes, and from what I was told if you sail the 7 seas you can still install them just fine with lutris and latest gloriouseggroll proton.
This is what gave me the idea. I started watching videos of people doing this with recycled hardware, and it looks so fun.
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 🤬
That is a cursed name for a motherboard.
Sounds OEM
Gramps went musk off with giving weird names.
Just because you have OS install media and hardware does not mean the hardware functions. In fact, old hardware often fails MEMTST.
I’m sure that is often the case. But with this series, Its this specific model. A friend of mine has the Asus M32 from the previous year and he was able to get mint installed without any issues. Just bad luck with the model I bought. It’s always given me headaches so not being able to switch to linux tracks
Have you tried LibreBoot? Is that still a project?
