Install Linux on them and give them to school children so they can go to school online and not have to worry about being shot. I also see a lot of lithium in that pile.
It breaks my heart that so much of these will end up in landfills. Resell them. Or send them to device recycling. There’s a shitload of rare earths in modern-ish but obsolete computers. And downcycling is possible too - my router is an old Lenovo thin client with a dual port 10g SCP+ card slapped in it.
Looking at the used market where I live, quite a large number of laptops are already sold with Windows 11 installed even when officially unsuported. Activated with MAS as well, probably.
That doesn’t sound like a tough choice at all…
… that’s a really compelling reason for linux.
I mean the next few years are going to be rough. Being able to recycle these things for basic use is going to be huge. Windows, mac, people need the internet more than anything else. It’s a sad way to gain adoption but it could be insanely impactful…
The right answer is definitely not landfill.
Most people use their computers to run a web browser, maybe a word processor or media player, and… not much else. Even someone who has only used Windows can figure out those basics on a Linux desktop.
If the charities are unable/unwilling to provide support for Linux, they could give computers away on Craigslist before dumping more e-waste into our environment.
My wife’s 90 year old grandma was able to pick up Mint with absolutely no issue. Just put the shit she needed on the desktop and that was that.
I did that for my grandmother with FreeBSD many moons ago, on a Pentium3 no less. It ran for years and years like a champ. Booted straight into PySol since that was pretty much all she ever did on a computer.
PySolBSD :)
Even someone who has only used Windows can figure out those basics on a Linux desktop.
You’d think…
Edge is on Linux (bottom of the page). Throw a windoze skin on KDE and it would be like they never left.
I think there are a lot of gunky software out there that only works on Windows. I tried getting my mom on Linux but I was unable to find any good open source sewing and graphic alternatives to the expensive lock in hardware that she had already bought.
Although I doubt these are the kind of road blocks charities are facing.
“Companion softwares” for hardware are the only thing that still makes me use my Windows VM. In my case it’s my children’s educative computers which need a real computer to add content.
One thing I wonder about Linux is the OOBE for new users. A lot of Linux distros have you create the user and whatnot when you install the OS; it’s not always intuitive on making a new user account to personalize. It’d make it a lot easier to preinstall distros and then let the user deal with finishing setup to their needs.
At least Mint has an OEM install; on the first boot after installing the system, it asks you to create a user (plus language, layout etc.). I never used it though, but I expect other distros to have a similar feature.
One-click Linux cluster. Local compute, NAS, or self-hosting. Be a shame if it all ended in landfill.
Back in the day, there was a distributed cluster OS called Mosix. Even back then I had several spare computers lying about, and the idea of being able to chain them all together and have one virtual computer that would automatically distribute processing without special coding was enticing. It turned out to not work very well unless you did specially code for it, or clustered the computers very tightly with fiber; it just wasn’t worth it.
But when I see piles of compute like this, a part of my still wants to network them all together and run … well, whatever fills the shoes of OpenMosix these days, if anything does.
Some modern workloads can take advantage of multiple computers. You can usually compile using things like distcc and spread the load across them.
If you make them into a Kubernetes cluster you can run many copies or many different things.
It’s still an unsolved problem: we still end up with single core bottlenecks to this day, before even involving other machines altogether.
Get new machines
That sounds unreasonable until you realize that an 8th gen CPU isn’t bad. Other option is to pay for long term support.
This is the honest headline we deserve.
I understand that people need to be a bit more tech savvy to use Linux over windows but I reckon that KDE for example is really similar to windows (but actually much much better) and with the ai chatbots we currently have available I reckon any non-tech users would be able solve most of the issues with the chatbot’s help
Only tech savvy for installing an OS, other than that Linux is a better experience for less tech savvy users. My wife struggled with Windows and how things don’t make sense (it was also slow) so I setup nixOS with GNOME, no more complaints
Does your wife install packages with NixOS? This is one of the few distros I tried (and now main) that I genuinely cannot recommend to anyone not willing to spend days learning the lang & concepts.
No, she is very bad with tech. I have added everything she needs for her web, email, spreadsheet, zoom call use. NixOS is super easy for an average person who can edit a text file though. You go to this site https://search.nixos.org/packages , search what you want, it gives you the code to paste into your config, and run a rebuild…or options for a temp install. Seems painless.
