Preventing e-waste by selling old desktops with Linux due to low system requirements
Sounds like a good way to make use of old eMachines, at a large discount too.
Finally, the year of the Linux Desktop! (eMachine edition)
When quarantines hit and everyone was communicating via zoom, I offered to recycle people's computers and destroy their old hard drives for free. I'd remove and drill multiple holes through the hard drives, vacuum/dust the computer, install a small, inexpensive HDD, and install Ubuntu.
Then I'd install zoom and chrome (sorry) and then pair each computer with a wired mouse, keyboard, and webcam that I had laying around in bulk. Then I'd drop these computers off at shelters, elder communities, and religious institutions. Essentially, anywhere you'd find someone who didn't have the means to contact family, attend an interview, or whatever.
Recycling/upcycling old computers isn't just good for the environment and your investment, it's good for your community!
You’re doing the lord’s work, fartographer
Eh, I didn't have much else going on and playing Jackbox remotely with my family made me realize how much others were possibly missing out. I don't even know if or how those computers were used. I just had a lot of time on my hands and an urge to use my then-new drill. Then, I'd move the equipment out before my wife killed me and then let literally anyone else handle the logistics.
Prior to the pandemic, I'd take 20+ year-old laptops and other equipment to a friend's ranch and we'd shoot shit. One time, I peppered myself with glass from a CRT after shooting it from a few feet away with a 16 ga.
I'm not directed by charity, I'm just wildly impulsive and occasionally productive.
Do we have a rimjob Steve comm?
Then I'd install zoom and chrome (sorry)
You monster...
Chaotic good
Why chrome?
Mainly because it's what people knew and expected. "Other" browsers make it too easy to blame user errors on an unfamiliar environment or interface.
But most of all, it's about picking my battles. I'm there to get employees and volunteers to help vulnerable people get connected and don't want to get hung up on trying to educate them about privacy and ethics.
Sometimes, designing systems for non-technical people requires a little compromise on the licensing extremism that is very baked into FOSS culture.
It is why most Linux folks are stoked that Linux can play Windows games reliably — it means that millions of Windows lifers are getting exposed to Arch Linux for the first time. Sure, Steam is proprietary, and so are Nvidia drivers, but nobody decides to start with Linux and stay there (they do, but, I am talking single digit numbers vs the billions using Windows). Everyone has to start somewhere.
That said, big frown on Ubuntu. I would personally prefer something like Debian that has fewer major update increments, or an immutable Arch setup.
"Ewww, Ubuntu? Honey, don't touch it. We're an Arch family."
-No one ever
"We use Arch in this house, BTW"
Ah! Nailed it.
Me, a Debian Enjoyer but Ubuntu Hater: 👀
I mean I'm bit of an Ubuntu hater, not because its bloated or whatever, but because they're too corpo.
I stopped using it back when they put Amazon in their start menu.
I'm all about upcycling PCs with Linux, but I think selling a PC with 2GB RAM is going to make Linux look bad. It's gonna handle its resources better than windows, but 2GB is just too little for today's standards. It will not run well.
edit:considering this is 10 years old judging by the versions used, back then it would have been okayish, I have a convertible from that time with the same specs but it just can't keep up anymore.
That's what my NetBook had, back when those were The Thing To Have :)
Combine that will a failing hard drive and you have a train wreck
Ubuntu 16.04? Was this photo taken 8-9 years ago?
idk if it’s that old but it’s certainly not recent, ive seen this photo floating around for years
My search shows it's at least as old as 2017
Idk what year that pic was taken, but 2GB of ram is useless no matter what operating system you put on it.
Except ofc for a home nas, but as a desktop, the user is going to open Firefox, try to open a website, it will take minutes to load and the user just wasted $20
2GB of ram is useless no matter what operating system you put on it.
Ubuntu 16.04
This is an old photo
It's a poor spec for a phone, let alone a PC.
Sometimes it's best just to scrap it.
Libre Office 5.2 seems to have been released in August 2016.
5 minutes ago I was gaming on my 2gb Windows XP machine.
I just installed my tenth distro on a 2gb netbook, and they all played games of that era just as well as I remember. Just got done playing a map on dawn of war.
I don't expect these things to play cyberpunk 2077, but if you just want to play stardew valley or terraria it is more than sufficient.
My NAS had 4GB and eventually I maxed it out to 16GB when the pricing for its type of RAM dropped significantly.
Mine has 256Mb for steaming audio. Doesn't use it all even :)
After reading that, I just checked my memory. After an hour and a half using FF and and a videoplayer (on a reasonably up-to-date Ubuntu 20.x-based XFCE system), I'm using 2.2GB (out of 16, fairly typical, with no swap). So I'm pretty sure that - depending as always on what software they've chosen - 2GB is far from 'useless'. As always, depends on the use case. That's plenty if you spend most days in a text editor coding.
I mean, installing alpine is surprisingly simple and is capable of playing HD youtube by modern standards
Important note: alpine is black magic and the comparison I'm making is not really sensical if we take into account that one needs at least some terminal knowledge for alpine, let alone install doas instead of sudo (which is bloaty, as it turns out (for alpine stabdards at least))
MS-DOS
Plenty of mem for Xv6
More importantly the GPU is going to be unable to process modern graphics which means it will fall to the CPU. The desktop will be very slow and potentially unstable.
2 gigs of ram is going to be incredibly rough in 2025. Linux is better on old hardware but those specs are pretty optimistic.
This image is at least 10 years old
It's at most 9 years old, as it mentions Ubuntu 16.4.
I was able to get Windows 11 to run on a 10 year old laptop through Proxmox. With 3 other Linux OSs running at the same time. With almost no issues. The Win11 system requirements are made up. It’s a way to sell more computers, that’s it. Line go up is all it is.
Still a very inefficient OS
Oh totally! It took 5x longer to install than endeavorOS and Arch combined. It was really more of a test. I was just surprised that it ran at all on such low allocated resources given how inefficient it is! Especially since it wouldn’t pass the system requirements they allegedly require to upgrade from win10. I guess the point I’m driving home is, if you really HAVE to use windows, there are janky, hoop-jumping workarounds. It’s all getting wiped anyways. I’ll probably load LM or an Arch flavor for more fun tests later. It’ll end up as ewaste in a couple years anyway. The onboard vent fans are dying.
Yes, but at the end of the day you're still running Windows.
This is exactly how I got into Linux .
Had some... Life troubles.
Started over.
Needed computer.
Local community employment/outreach/social support place had a volunteer run computer place in the basement (they also had a bike place, and a cafe or two, and some apartments, and they were the best community org ever..).
100$
I bought 2 over a couple years.
I'm pretty sure they had xubuntu.
Over 10 years later I still have both. And I just put mint 23xfce on one and use it as my living room media player - dvi to HDMI projector.
I have no need for a lot of stuff. I make work what I can. And I keep it working as long as I can however I can.
Love the “Installed and tested by Tim G.”
Hey bro you got Tim G. PC too?
Thanks Tim!
$20 is one hell of a price, considering how much time must have gone into this machine!
That depends on their setup.
Taking donated PCs to save them from e-waste. Hooking it up to a large KVM and running hardware diags then a image script to load OS, software and quick check for drivers and functionality...
Maybe 15-30 min labor if you're efficient and doing them in bulk.
... Yeah still a good deal haha.
I used to do this kind of work. With a wall of monitors mounted and PCs below. It was pretty chill and just needed to poke one when needed.
make use of old eMachines
eMachines was a brand of economical personal computers. In 2004, it was acquired by Gateway, Inc., which was in turn acquired by Acer Inc. in 2007. The eMachines brand was discontinued in 2013.
My husband says eMachines have a pretty common capacitor problem. It's an easy fix to remove and replace for people who know how.
Before selling, the capacitors should be visually checked, at minimum, because they can leak and that's no good.
that’s most older electronics in some way shape or form, tho. i’d hope any reseller with space for shelves of product is doing a good look-over of everything they put up. or selling it with a disclaimer/nonguarantee.
All capacitors fail but items from around the time e machines were selling have capacitor plague and are thus more likely to fail.
It isn't limited to just eMachines
Most of the Windows XP age hardware I've seen in the last few years as been dead due to capacitor failure.
That's probably okay if all you want to do is browse the web.
But with an Intel celeron you're not going to get very far even if you do have a more efficient operating system.
Well it is a $20 computer. I can imagine it serving as someone's introduction to Linux because "why not, it's cheap enough for an experiment".
You can get better hardware for free
Go to some companies in your area and ask for some old hardware. They probably have a bunch of 6/7/8th machines. They probably all have 8gb of ram and you can buy cheap sata SSDs that will vastly outperform a old beat up hard drive.
I dub thee, sexbox, and she won't leave me like all the other women did.
It's a 20$ PC. Fair enough, I say.
Not really as you can get quite a lot for not much money
*Browse Wikipedia
I know it’s an old photo but it’s funny to me how they describe the machine itself in very simple terms in a way that any person could probably understand with minimal technical knowledge (here’s the programs it has it works ok), and then there’s so much internet lingo and borderline tech speak for the reasons to opt for Linux instead of Windows lol. Could have started with “it’s faster!”
Oh you're right! I thought this was new. But, at least as old as 2017, at least from my search.
But yes, way too tech lingo.
They also make the tired old claim that it's immune to Windows viruses. Well yeah it's immune to the windows versions of those viruses but there are plenty viruses for Linux and obviously Mac as well.
I get quite annoyed about this claim everyone seems to make where they claim that because you run and non-windows OS you're suddenly immune to viruses.
I think the photo is quite old though so it was a little more true back then maybe. But it's definitely not a statement I would make today.
This may as well be porn to me.
The year of the Linux eDishwasher!
This is useless. It's not even high enough spec to run your Electron calculator in a sandboxed container.
/s
runs great on older less powerful hardware
better hardware support, not having to hunt down drivers
I remember installing Linux on my old laptop. It took me half a day to find working drivers for my WiFi card. It's probably better now but whenever I read stuff like this I call bullshit.
it's a lot better now to the point you don't even need to search for drivers. I can't even recall the last time I had to search for drivers on Linux, it just has them and some people have even made drivers for the most obscure things that not even windows supports anymore. Hell a couple months ago I found a driver someone made for something called a "Dex Drive" which was an old dongle for Playstation Memory cards.
Linux is 10x easier today. Even running windows programs is a hell of a lot easier and in many cases work the exact same way as on Windows. double click the exe, install it, you're good to go.
WiFi cards were an iconic problem many years ago.
Nowadays I almost never have issues with WiFi
The only wifi that doesn't work out of the box these days is broadcom cards.
For some reason MediaTek hadn't released a Linux driver for their popular MT7902. Really annoying. Please sign this petition: https://www.change.org/p/mediatek-should-provide-a-linux-driver-for-mt7902
I learnt that the hard way ...
I have had to do it one or two years ago for my previous installation, but that's because I was using Debian on a computer whose WiFi card does not have open source drivers. But in Ubuntu it worked out of the box, and I think it may work out of the box on Debian too now that they include non free firmware by default.
You only need to install special drivers manually if you use a distro that is a bit "advanced".
I'm troubled that my older hardware is way less power efficient doing the same tasks.
The most environmentally friendly computer is the one you already have. No power savings is so great as to offset the environmental cost of manufacturing of a new machine, shipping it to you, and the environmental impact of putting the existing machine into landfill. Run it into the ground until it either physically breaks or is literally no longer capable of performing the tasks you need. It's not an environmental gain to upgrade JUST for power efficiency.
i guess the eMachines truly were never obsolete
I had an exact machine like this, with these specs, just with an internal Nvidia GPU and 4 extra video cards added. Using USB splitters and USB audio cards, we made that computer work for 5 users simultaneously.
Built software for initial setup (what USB mouse and KB goes with what monitor?) and it worked like a charm.
There was even enough ram available to run a single virtual box instance with Windows XP (I believe) for one single user.
The Linux desktop was skinned to look like Windows XP too and for class rooms we used... I forgot the name, some open source classroom management system where the teacher could guide students remotely
Linux is awesome
$20 👍
Heroes don't all wear capes!
No Capes!
No capes, for reason for reason, on Tux
What has kept me from trying Linux is my fear of not understanding what I'm doing all over again, and difficulty running all of my games. I've used Windows since the mid-90s and I'm very good/familiar with it. Diving headfirst into a new OS and feeling like an idiot again is not something I want, so I've been too afraid to make that jump. I also don't know whether or not the difficulty running games thing is overblown.
Linux Mint is often recommended to the uninitiated and you can test it without installing it, using a live USB image. Boot up of off the USB drive, test it, turn it off, pop out the drive, tun it back on, you're back to your old OS.
Whatever the linux flavor, the graphical part will most likely be called GNOME or KDE. They're very user-friendly, you just need to explore a bit with your mouse.
Games have improved tremendously thanks to Valve and you can play most of them on linux via compatibility layers.
Games are now incredibly easy to run on Linux thanks to Proton. I haven't tested my entire back catalog but I've yet to encounter an actual problem that required a fix since I switched to Linux for good earlier this year.
Anecdotal, but I remember the difficulty of running games as the reason I never fully committed in the past. I'll never touch Windows again. I see the learning curve as a positive. I'm always excited to dive deeper into Linux.
Well, running pirated games in Linux does mean doing diagnostics of why a game won't work - i.e. figure out the missing system DLLs and adding them with Winetricks - rather that having the fansy-pantsy install scripts in something like Steam or Lutris do it for you.
On the upside you can sandbox the pirated games in Linux.
For one of my games the official Steam copy wouldn't run in Linux, yet a pirate version runs just fine.
In summary, if you're doing the normal, expected thing, it's generally fine (with but a few exceptions) and works out of the box because there are scripts configuring Wine/Proton with the right DLLs for that game, but if you do anything outside that, you do have to understand how to get Wine/Proton to output the appropriate log information, what to look for in it to figure out which DLLs you need, and how to add the right DLLs (and which version: built-in or native) to that Wine/Proton environment once you figured out that you need it.
I was like you and I took the plunge when W10 was given its death sentence. I watched a few tutorials on YouTube, picked a distro (Mint, it feels very familiar if you come from a windows environment) and after a few days of dual boot I got rid of Windows for good. Never looked back.
Initially there were some little hurdles with games, you can install Steam very easily (flatpaks are a godsend) but only a small selection of games are Linux-compatible by default. Then I heard about Proton, and with another flatpak installation boom all my Steam games worked, and damn well I have to add.
Then I heard about Lutris, and my Sims games that I thought I'd never get to play again now work.
Please don't worry about not knowing what you're doing, if you pick a distro like Mint you will not have to mess up with the terminal unless you choose to. Try running a distro on a virtual machine to see how it feels!
There are some that will have a familiar interface to you. I don't have experience myself but since the Steam Deck came out gaming on Linux has been rapidly improving.
like others are saying: I installed a second NVMe SSD and put Linux Mint on it. This was a very simple task, and it automatically setup a boot window so when I start the computer it gives me the option to pick Windows or Linux. Linux Mint has a software center where I selected and installed Steam w/ Proton (again, super easy to setup, lots of online instructions) and my games work just fine. I keep Windows just because I dont want to lose my access to the OS, but Linux is now my main.
I can't speak to games, but I've found that when I used Ubuntu, it was pretty easy to figure out. I'm thinking other distros should be comparably simple.
Dual boot. then if you can't deal with linux anymore, you've lost nothing.
edit: or play around with a live cd. Both work equally well.
I have close to no problems with games that are compiled for Windows.
The only real problem is anti-cheats actively combating Linux/Wine/Proton: https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Anything else either works or does so after a few Wine/Proton updates.
These days I would pair that with Debian and IceWM
Ubuntu? Yuck! Give me Mint.
you are a good person <3
2gb of ram really isn't enough
At least give them something usable. I see a lot of 6th gen machines on the market and they can be loaded with 8/16gb of ram.
This would be the only way to convince me to try Linux.