Documenting the descent into madness
Documenting the descent into madness
My wife has asked me not to turn the house into a tech junkyard.
Comments
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There's about to be a lot more surplus hardware since Microsoft arbitrarily decided they can't update to Windows 11.
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And real good specs on most those machines, most will be at least DDR4 some even DDR5
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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.
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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.
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This is what gave me the idea. I started watching videos of people doing this with recycled hardware, and it looks so fun.
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Those images are in the wrong direction.
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What if I like being the clown?
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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.
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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.
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it’s not even legal
Isn't there one that has both, the OS vendor and the hardware seller as a same entity?
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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!
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I have 3 old cellphones that for the life of me, no matter how hard I tried - couldn't install an alt android OS on it
One device was compatible - but I couldn't unlock the boot loader
One device was never tested against any alt OSes
One device was carrier locked.
I also have one old Galaxy Tab that I spent weeks trying to flash another ROM to it - and it fails every time.
I'm 0/4 on trying to reanimate old android hardware - it's just too difficult and too much hoops to go through.
At least I'm fairly capable with installing Linux on old laptops - and given that a new wave of Win11 compatible laptops is coming - I'll get to do it more frequently soon.
I haven't tried to do LUKS yet, and I'm dying to get my hands on a Yubikey and learn what I can make it do.
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Mobile device flashing is a fucking alien world. Samsung products are not good for it, especially in the US.
The alt OS's are mainly built against ancient hardware, and the SKUs that work are so limited that they're not particularly cheap on the used market.
The best thing you can do is go fairphone or pixel and specifically get one of the models that is directly claimed as supported.
If you can't get it to work, find the OS forums and hop in, someone will bend over backward to help you out if you're nice about it.
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Yeah. I have like 5 collecting dust. Should give them away (not us) but I'm pretending that I'll set up a fake cloud service to try terraform (open stack maybe?)
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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.
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And Taco Bell drive thru, apparently
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I
Fuck it, we ball
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F
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Trader Joe’s registers run Suse.
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F
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My vacuum proudly runs Valetudo!
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My 1 dollar vacuum I got at a thrift store is still chugging somehow.
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Buy e-waste? I have people give it to me for free. Offer to recycle it for them.
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The classic
offers to recycle
actually installs esoteric Linux distros
Classic!
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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.
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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.
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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 it 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.
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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.
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This is the life I want for myself.
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I came here to discover why this tactics gets the full clown… yes… we must renew machines and THEN GIVE THEM AWAY.
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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.
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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.
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What's the oldest?
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So far 2008-2009. Waiting to find some quality beige cases lol
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I I feel personally attacked IT WAS $5
OK
Freebsd is very different from linux, ive spent a few hours trying to get gpu drivers working for this crusty CPU.
Old hardware has a special place in my heart, aswell as my shelf >:)
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It has a fingerprint sensor?
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Yes, i haven't used it but its quite the oddity
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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.
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Your average company is woefully prepared to deal with ewaste. If you sell it, there are legal and financial ramifications. Assuming you could make at most a couple hundred on a box, the labor to take it someplace, deal with finance, deal with legal, deal with returns for anything that goes doa in the move. The best you can do is sell or give it to a wholesaler who will give you near nothing for it to shoulder the risk.
Whenever possible, I release old hardware to end users. Refresh it, let them give it to their kids/family/whatever.
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A combination of warranty expiry, the tenancy to replace instead of repair/upgrade, Windows 10 being the go to, even after W11 launched, and the W10 end of life, all combine into a neat pile of ewaste from enterprises that's flooding the market.
It's a great time for those of us that use enterprise company discards as computers.
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Yes! Gotta figure out the new models, hopefully it will be some good times. I just love being 5 years after, at a fraction of the price.
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I’m pretty certain at this point that I’m about to be forced to buy some programming socks.
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Linux being a sexuality is a myth!
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I beg to disagree. I am only attracted to Linux users.
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Ehh, big bucks and job security can be quite an afridesiac. Just have to make sure to stay clean and presentable, and share some leisure activities that your potential mates will enjoy.
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Does anyone have a few optiplexes lying around?
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My favorite dependable cheap Linux host. Just sucks about the power draw.
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my workplace is selling a few optiplex 3040-s with i3-6100, 4gigs of ram of unqualified variety, 120gb ssd, 512 gb hdd, for about 55$, is that a good deal? (this is in hungary btw)
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I never exactly paid for any. Didn't exactly steal. Didn't exactly pay. I'd call it "appropriate"
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I've seen worse deals. The platform itself is probably worth that much (meaning the mainboard, chassis, and all the accompanying stuff like heatsinks and power supplies).... 6th gen CPUs are probably dirt cheap, assuming those systems use a socketed CPU, and you wanted to upgrade to something more than an i3. I can't imagine RAM would be much more.
You can probably turn these into very decent little machines for under $100 each and a bit of effort.
It really depends on whether you need the extra capability for a bit of effort or you're fine with the i3 with 4G RAM.
I usually want to replace the storage on a used system with something new or refurbished because of wear and tear, but that's me. Still, that's not a bad deal. Free would be a great deal, but I'm not sure you could ask for better.
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Dude I have my childhood desktop running a jellyfin server, I'd kill for an optiplex
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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 🤬
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That is a cursed name for a motherboard.
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Would you rather Gaming Extreme MAX Torpedo Super Champ Grand Prix Haxx 2020 Ultra MAX Elite ?
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Gramps went musk off with giving weird names.
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Sounds OEM
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Just because you have OS install media and hardware does not mean the hardware functions. In fact, old hardware often fails MEMTST.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Your theory is based on the assumption that only Windows/Microsoft software increases in bloat exponentially.
This is not true: look at the internet. For example Gmail used to have a basic HTML version, but Google killed it, and the normal version takes longer and longer to load even on new hardware. New Reddit also is a mess of over-Javascript-frameworked capitalistry, complete with those annoying grey lines that appear where text should be when the page is loading.
Even open-source software is not immune to this. KDE on an Intel Celeron/2GB RAM computer feels very slightly sluggish, like walking through an atmosphere that's too thick.
Wirth's Law states that as more features are added to a piece of software, it will become slower.
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That's exactly what I did in the late 90s/early 2000s. Never regretted it.
Try getting Linux to run on a 486 w/4MB RAM and a 40MB hard drive. You tend to learn a lot while getting the most out of that.
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So far I have resisted but I still regret not buying the 160GB ram HP workstation for 20 bucks a couple weeks ago :(
Also, it's a good idea to have 2 or 3 SBCs sitting in a drawer unused, for the sole purpose of looking at them when the urge to buy something hits again.
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160GB ram for 20 bucks... I'd have taken that regardless
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160 GB RAM workstation for $20 might be one of those you'll regret passing on, because I'm getting second-hand regret. Can I send you $20 and you send it to me?
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If only the offer wasn't long gone by now... ;_;
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At least you remember where you put them :-|
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I would reverse the clown images so that the user starts as a clown and ends not one
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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.
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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 :(
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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......
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They are bloody spectacular for programming arduino or flashing your 3D printer.
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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.
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Could set it up as a fileserver
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Time to build a LAN party cafe in my basement and install all the DRM free classic FPS games I own on all the devices.
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After all, why not? Why shouldn't I build a Beowulf of my own?
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I first heard this term the other day, but it was in the context of "nobody does this anymore". I looked it up and it sounds cool... is there any reason I shouldn't consider it in 2025?
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These days people usually just call it a "cluster" w/o reference to the Beowulf system from the 90s.
The amount of compute you can fit in a single box w/o having to deal with distributed systems BS is kind of insane now though. You probably don't need a cluster to do a lot of things you would've needed one for in the past -- a single computer is often already good enough and way simpler to manage...
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I mean you could, but kubernet/containers really help it not be needed, as you can just run on any hardware and it doesnt have to be the same stuff on all the systems.
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I looked into it a while ago but I gave up on the idea after realizing how few programs can actually run on one. There's no "reverse VM" software that allows you to seamlessly combine multiple physical machines into one virtual one. Each application has to be specifically designed to take advantage of running on a cluster. If you're writing your own code, or if you have a specific project in mind that you know supports cluster computing then by all means go for it, but if you're imagining that you'd build one and use it for gaming or video editing or some other resource intensive desktop application, unfortunately it doesn't work like that.
Edit: I dug up a link to the post I made about it in /c/linux. There's some good discussion in there if you'd like to learn more https://lemmy.world/post/11528823
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Im strongly considering a decent into madness. Where should I start if the computer I will need to adapt is a 12 year old Macbook pro?
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Disclaimer: I would start with an "eWaste" computer from eBay, so I don't lose my main machine.
As someone mentioned, Dell Optiplex is a popular option.
We expect a flood of them (and others) to hit secondary used markets soon as companies offload anything that cannot run Windows 11 with secure boot enabled.
Disclaimer aside, assuming the 12 year old Macboom Pro is the secondary machine, the usual guidance applies:
- start with a distro that lets you test boot with a Live USB key.
- when in doubt, try Linux Mint first.
We love to debate the merits of our favorite distros, but when I was just getting started, I quickly discovered that most of what I wanted to try out actually ran on any distro. The only thing that varried was how many commands I needed to set each thing up.
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I had manjaro on my 2012 MacBook for a while. It dual booted even. So I guess Arch?
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MacBooks with intel chip are some of the best hardware to put Linux on, there are plenty of guides online on how to liberate your MacBook with Linux.
I tested a bunch of distros based on Debian, Arch and Fedora. By far, the easiest one was EndeavourOS just because it recognized the WiFi driver from the Live USB for me. Otherwise you will need to use a mobile phone with USB tethering to share internet so you can install the broadcom driver. Maybe things changed, but this was my experience in 2023.
Another driver you will need to install is the camera facetimehd . Everything else worked out-of-the-box for me.
After that, all the Linux variants I tried worked great, and it was mostly about distro philosophies and deciding the desktop environments (DE) I wanted to use, and that can be a bit overwhelming at first.
If that is your first experience, I just recommend to start with KDE or gnome. I find gnome works ok from the start, but KDE is easier to tweak. You can always test them from a Linux Live USB before committing them to your hardware. Steam Deck uses KDE for desktop mode.
There are others that are prettier or lighter you can test too: cinnamon, XFCE, MATE. Or even windows managers, but I would leave them alone until you are a bit more comfortable with Linux.
here are a few links in case some people need it in the future:
- facetimehd https://github.com/patjak/facetimehd/wiki/Installation
- https://boilingsteam.com/liberating-the-macbook-air-2013-with-linux-complete-guide/ (sorry for the plug, but it shows all my experience installing with an in-depth guide)
- https://endeavouros.com/
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Thank you so much for this!
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I just did a 2012 mac book air, well 'just' was probably 2023... but i digress
Ubuntu went straight on, just works, runs quickly. I'd have done debian which is more my go to, but I wanted to get the maximum level of community support and I think ubuntu has that.
basic instructions:
https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/create-a-usb-stick-on-macos#1-overview
or
There were a couple of fights:
I wanted to swap the function and alt buttons to match my linux pc's, which was a special problem, because the FN key has its own special controller. There's a page and a utility for it somewhere on the internet that lets you reprogram it. I doubt you'd want that though, since you're already used to the layout.
The runtime on battery was awful, but it was a 4GB ancient Air. Out of the gate, I got a max of 2 hours, and OSX was getting 6-8 hours.
I installed TLP, twisted the governors WAY down, got it up to 4 hours while still usable. It still runs better in 4GB than OSX, just not as long.
Honestly, the Mac hardware is kinda rough for Linux. I run it on Lenovos and Dells and get 90+% of their normal battery life.
But it does work on Mac and runs quite well, even with very little RAM. I will say, you still need to throttle down that processor or they get a bit toasty :)
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Thank you!
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12 year old MacBook Pro? wtf, this is so greenfield. Some of the best Linux hardware ever.
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As someone running two 2010 MacBooks on Linux, most of it is straightforward but I would add a few notes:
- It was helpful for me, as someone very familiar with OSes and hardware but NOT Linux, to pull detailed hardware reports off my Macs before I wiped MacOS off all the way, and to have the specs either memorized or within easy reach whenever I started reading the technical stuff, because there's a good bit of that unless you happen to find a first distro that matches your hardware exactly. Instead, it's more likely you'll kiss some frogs before you find The One. Some distros are worth the trouble of making them work, some are not, but either way know your exact specs, especially for your wifi chip, so you can recognize them when you see them mentioned.
- If you think you may ever run MacOS on them again, for any reason, but do not have another Mac handy, go ahead and make a MacOS bootable install drive now of the latest supported OS and throw it in a drawer. I never thought I would need it, but I did it out of an abundance of precaution and ended up using it multiple times, to my own surprise. But it's damned difficult to do without another Mac around to create the install media for you, so cover your ass and do it anyway if that MacBook is the last Mac you have.
- I made a GParted Live USB and it's become one of the most used USB drives I own. No matter the OS, no matter the fuckery you've gotten yourself into (and clearly I have), if you can boot off USB it submits to the magic of GParted. Strong recommend.
- Know that you cannot use Ventoy on MacBooks. At all. It kept crapping out on me, I spent hours on it, but when I read the forum (and the dev's comments to others with the same problem) turns out that nope, Ventoy does not work with MacBooks. Don't waste your time -- or do, if your nihilistic enjoyment of futility needs a strenuous workout.
- If you don't already have a handful of available USBs, buy a ten (or more) pack of 8GB USB drives somewhere cheap, and just start rolling. They will all get used and reused as you go about trying out various distros and then comparing the ones you liked best, and you will appreciate not having to reformat the same USB every time you want to go to something different.
- You've been told about Live USBs, but the thing with these older MacBooks is that a lot of it's just a pure crapshoot when it comes to a specific distro making happy times with your specific hardware. Usually it's the older Broadcom wifi chips, but I've had other problems. So when you boot into a live trial, you really want to make sure you're testing ALL the hardware that matters to you (wifi, Ethernet, sound, mouse, trackpad, display, camera, etc) and not just assuming.
And even then it's not certain: I just recently put Debian 13 with KDE Plasma on my mid-2010 MacBook and it sped through the Live USB trial and even the netinstall process on wifi, but as soon as it was running on the installed OS I had download speeds in the fucking bytes before I understood that the Live USB and the OS were using different Broadcom drivers. I found a guide and it was an easy enough fix, but definitely a pain in the ass. These things happen, so expect them.
- Linux will recognize memory that MacOS will not, so go ahead and fill your actual motherboard capacity even if Apple says it's unsupported. Chances are good you'll want to upgrade other hardware as well; I've had good luck using iFixit for guides and it's worth the trouble to ask around for recommendations on where to buy, but in general avoid Amazon, especially for batteries.
- After you've installed Linux, run it on a stand for good airflow, open the case and really clean your fan, and/or replace your thermal grease (which it's past time for anyway) because Linux does tend to run warm on these old MacBooks.
That said, these are excellent machines, a fun project, and honestly I think I like them more now than when I first got them: I never knew how versatile they could be. Hope some of this helps you.
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It's been a couple of weeks since i switched to mint and gotta tell you that this is very tempting
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I run a Windows 7 laptop and bought a PC at Value Village and maxed out the RAM thanks to Aliexpress. Junk FTW!!
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I feel so attacked. The accuracy of this is unreal.
Started with a NAS for me. Now my old laptop runs a distal distro and I'm thinking of all the "worthless" computers that can't run windows 11 that I might be able to buy for cheap...
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Shouldn't the images be in reverse order?
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It's reducing e-waste and using older tech for something atleast, both of which would normally wouldn't happen
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Exactly, not clownish at all.
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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" -
OP after trying Linux:
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This is the story of my OnePlus 6T…
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That's still a fairly useful phone. 6GB ram, SDM 845/55 or something. It's great compared to my redmi 4x (with motherboard problems) and nord n10 (somehow doesn't get mobile signal after replacing the subboard). Goddanmit, I hate the nord. What the hell should I do with it I tried replacing the antena cables, board connections, using the original subboard. NOTHING FUCKING WORKS.
If anyone knows what I should do with the nord, I'm open to suggestions.
That's all for my rant.
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Fucking hell, I didn’t even notice the wig but here I am, fully clowned.
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Where does one find old tech on the cheap?
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Make friends with some PC repair people. Depending on where you live, a LOT of Win10 stuff is getting thrown out right now. If you present yourself as an alternative to recycling/scrapping, you might get a good deal.
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I bought two old Thinkpads on eBay for $20 each. They run Debian + i3 great and have become my daily portable drivers.
Edit: a new battery and ssd did bring the total up to $100 for the pair.
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When I first started learning PCs and Linux, I just went to the local thrift stores and Value Village. Even today people turn in all kinds of perfectly working compute hardware, mostly just old. Consumer stuff doesn't retain much resale value and many cannot be bothered with trying to sell it, so it ends up in the dump, at the recyclers, in thrift stores, or on classified ads like Craig's list, kijiji and the like.
EBay usually only sees the stuff that can fetch a worthwhile dollar.
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Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It's also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department's refresh cycle. Only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you're willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.
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My local dump has an e-waste section. Corps straight up drop off 6x6x6 ft. tall cage totes full old laptops and desktops. Then the grandma bins full of VHS players and stuff.
There's signs saying you can't take anything, but nobody actually cares or stops you lol. As long as you're not causing trouble or making a mess digging deep into them.
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What? Don’t look at me like that! I totally need 70 computers! Yes they’re useful! They all have their purpose! That one? Its job is to be force-fed whatever weird obscure Linux distribution I just heard of! Oh, that one? That’s for testing Arch Linux configs on 25 year old hardware!
"What do you mean, 'Why do I need that stack of old ThinkPads?'. They were free!"
Who needs virtual machines when I can just use a separate device for every distro I want to try?
Very true. Also, redundancy
Why would I need an enterprise router if I can have a superfast, very extendable, very flexible and redundant router with two old desktop machines?
Also: Openwrt is a kind of Linux. That can be useful sometimes, when I need 10 custom wifi routers...
I had 11 OSes on a single laptop once, including a vestigial Vista partition that was barely hanging on
Where are you all getting free thinkpads from?
We are trash pandas at your next companys trash bin. They follow like minions M$ 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).
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
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.
I'd like to know where can i put my hand on a stack of free Thinkpads.