Linux or Landfill? End of Windows 10 Leaves PC Charities with Tough Choice

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.
- 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.
  
  Lol, I switched to kde plasma and because the windows logo bottom left was replaced with a K, neither my dad or my sister knew how to shut down the pc 🤦‍♀️
- I've done this for years with people in my family - either Ubuntu or Linux Mint. All most of them use is the browser, word processor, spreadsheets and an image and media viewer.
  For Desktop Environment I stick to KDE or something that looks and acts similar to Windows XP.
  I get very few complaints.
- Biggest issue is teams Id guess. The nonprofit deals MS gives small nonprofits with free 365 licenses and management is a huge one around here
  
  Can't you use Teams in a browser tho? That's what the teams client is essentially, Edge?

That doesn't sound like a tough choice at all...
- seriously i just deleted windows and put mint on my laptop (which is only like from 2020ish) and it runs better than it ever did on windows
- Yeah, both my Linux PC's probably wouldn't even run Win 10, let alone Win 11. As long as they work, pretty much any PC from the last decade can still run any distro and be sufficient to do any kind of productivity workload.
  
  Can confirm with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS vs my previous W11 install, it’s astonishing that a company with Microsoft’s resources can’t make an OS that runs as smoothly and efficiently as the open-source alternatives. Is it all just because of telemetry and whatever else Windows is phoning home with?

sounds like an easy choice

The article mentions how basic programs are missing. They acknowledge the existence of FOSS alternatives, e.g. GIMP instead of Photoshop Elements, but complain about it being too difficult or that some alternatives are simply not to be found via Mint's "Software Manager".
Which is not news and probably one of the reasons why desktop Linux-based distros have still not become mainstream. There's just a lack of all that "user-friendlyness" less tech-oriented people need.
These things can be changed, although there is an economic barrier. FOSS projects are great and we see how many of them took off. However, if the main portion of users are not on Linux, but on Windoofs, then it doesn't make much sense to invest time and money into developing and maintaining software for Linux while having commercial interests.
The sad reality is that Microsoft has gained that market dominance. You won't get end-user oriented software companies on board with Linux as long as the user-share is so comparably low. This is a self-reinforcing cycle.
Windoofs meets UX needs and there is a lot of software people need -> most people use Windoofs -> companies develop and distribute for Windoofs -> people keep using Windoofs, etc..
To break out of that, people need convincing alternatives. Not just for Linux alone, but especially for the software running on it.
Which is hard to achieve, given how a plethora of Linux projects have to survive on donations alone and too few companies take the leap.
There is a silver lining though. With the Steam Deck and Proton, Valve really got a lot more people on board with Linux. I can only hope, that this trend continues.
But at the moment I fear that this will be short lived, especially with Microsofts "handheld Xbox" on the horizon.
So let's see, how this unfolds. The EOL of Windows 10 is really a strong incentive to switch to Linux. For my part, I will go for the full switch, since I've used Windoofs mainly for gaming anyway and am using Linux systems daily for my job. But then again, I am an engineering scientist and I can't picture, e.g., my parents being satisfied with a Linux distro.
- Getting radical, but software is another example of why capitalism sucks and how a socialist system could improve things.
  In the domain of software design and distribution, when these things are run by companies that need to compete for market share and profit, then it just creates so much waste with needing everything to. be subscription based and filled with ads etc.
  If we didn't have this ultra competitive market system, then people who are passionate about software could be paid to self organise around various projects and design things for long term use value and not enshittification.
  
  Because people with the free time to do so have already come together and organized themselves around a single Linux distribution for this purpose?
- Lack of user-friendlylinesss ? What ? How much more user-friendly can we get ?
  Most things are point & click
  
  Is this a joke? The main way most Linux users install software is still via the command line.
  On Windows the command line is an exceptional thing you sometimes have to use for troubleshooting. On Linux it's the default way everything is done.
  For example how do you stop a service on Linux? The top answer just assumes command line.
  If I search for how to do it with a GUI I get a 5 year old post explaining that all the GUI attempts are dead.
  Now if I search for Windows, I get these instructions (from the AI but they sound like I remember it):
  open the Services console (search for "services" in the Start menu), right-click the service you want to stop, and select "Stop".
  And the top SO question is someone asking specifically how to do it with the command line because the GUI way is so easy and obvious.
  That's just one random example. Not even getting to hardware support, ease of installation, etc.
  
  Most isn't good enough, it has to be better than Windows. People will pay money to deal with the devil they know rather than learning something new.

How much ewaste has Microsoft caused just by wanting to sell more copies of the next version of windows.
- It's not about sales, 11 is a free upgrade.
  
  On a machine that can run it. If you have one of the machines that are the subject of this article, the only upgrade path is to buy a new one, for which Microsoft takes a healthy OEM fee for including Win11. You can easily see that cost on devices like the Legion Go S that cost significantly less for the SteamOS version.
- Windows 10 was released ten years ago. How long do you think they should provide support? For comparison, Redhat gives 10 years for LTS releases, and Ubuntu and Linux Mint give 5 years. Extended support beyond the LTS period requires a paid subscription, similar to Windows.
  
  They said when they launched windows 10 it would be "last version"
  
  Every OS just mentioned can be updated, no support needed? Just overlay the next kernel over the last and all these distros provide a pathway for that.
  Moreover, Arch, Void, Gentoo etc are rolling, so no loss of support.
  I figure a multi-million dollar company could do the equivalent of exactly that.
  
  They don't need to support Windows 10, they just need to not artificially block the installation of Windows 11 on old hardware.
  
  It's more that the hardware requirements for 11 are pretty arbitrary and not based on how powerful it is. My old PC can't run it, not that I care to in the first place. But it's much more powerful than my work laptop that can and does run win11, though not by my choice.

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 SFP+ card slapped in it.

I’m so tempted to do a charity program on my own and just receive 50k of these and put Ubuntu 24.04 or another user friendly Linux and drive around with my car trunk open and with a sign that says “free computers” while driving through New York
- wouldnt it save you a lot of time and gas if you just left the car unlocked or even locked somewhere in NY?
  
  Is it a Tesla?

... 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...

Linux. Each Linux OS, breathes new life into an old laptop. Least if that laptop is at least 15 ~ 20 years old. Laptops from the late 90s though? May have to go very old school Linux.

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.
  
  Yes. It's always the bandwidth that's the main bottleneck, whether CPU-Memory, IPC, or the network.
  Screw quantum computers; what we need is quantum entangled memory sharing at a distance. Imagine! Even if only within a single computer, all memory could could be L1 cache.
- Yeah, I've always wanted to do something like that. I've always got a bunch of computers running virtually idle and it would be nice if they could just help out with whatever your main PC is doing.

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.
  
  What do you use for your VM? I tried running a VM with QEMU but its pretty slow

I really hope people decide to leave windows finally.

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.

Any organization that promotes Linux should find some of these charities nearby and offer to assist them in installing Linux distros that feel like Windows. We need not divert this into an argument over which ones are best. The point is that besides keeping a lot of hardware out of landfills it would help spread awareness of how user friendly Linux has become. I've been using Mint Cinnamon for over a month and barely notice the difference from Win10.

One-click Linux cluster. Local compute, NAS, or self-hosting. Be a shame if it all ended in landfill.

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.
- I'm tech savvy, been in IT for nearly 40 years. Wrote my first program in Fortran on punched cards.
  Linux is no easy switchover. It's problematic, regardless of the distro (I've tried many over the years).
  My latest difficulty - went to install Debian and it hung multiple times trying to install wifi drivers.
  Mint can't use my Logitech mouse until I researched it and discovered someone wrote an app to enable it. The most popular mouse on the planet doesn't work out of the box.
  Typical user would be stumped by these problems.
  I can go on for days about "Year of the Linux Desktop" (which I first heard in 2000). Can Linux work as a desktop? Definitely. And it can be pretty damn good, too, if your use-case aligns with it's capabilities. But if you're an end-user type, what do you do a year in and realize you need a specific app that just doesn't exist in Linux?
  Is it a direct replacement for Windows? No. Because Windows has always been about general use - it trades performance for the ability to do a lot of varied things, it includes capabilities that not everyone needs.
  Linux is the opposite, it's about performance for specific things. If you want a specific capability, it has to be added. This is the challenge these different distros attempt to meet: the question for all of them is which capabilities to include "out of the box" (see my mouse example - Debian handles it just fine).
  This is also the power of Linux, and why it's so great for specific use-cases. Things like Proxmox, TrueNAS, etc, really benefit from this minimalism. No wasted cycles on a BITS service or all the other components Windows runs "just in case".
  
  I am sorry that you have had this much trouble, but I cannot agree that this experience is as typical as you are making it out to be. For me, the experience has always been that I install Linux and it Just Works out of the box, save for some things like printer/scanner drivers which you generally also need to download on Windows. Furthermore, it is far more pleasant as a desktop experience than Windows.
  (In fairness, though, I completely agree with you that Windows has more capabilities than Linux, given all of the advertisements it insists on showing me.)

This is the honest headline we deserve.

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.

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.
- Or just install win 11 anyways, it's not like it's actually incompatible