My wife has asked me not to turn the house into a tech junkyard.
I run a Windows 7 laptop and bought a PC at Value Village and maxed out the RAM thanks to Aliexpress. Junk FTW!!
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!
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?)
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.
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.
Fucking hell, I didn’t even notice the wig but here I am, fully clowned.
Where does one find old tech on the cheap?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would reverse the clown images so that the user starts as a clown and ends not one
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.
Getting the machine running was cake, getting online through dialup after that was the real pain :)
Oh, it had Ethernet, but it was with an AUI port.
Honey, break out the arc net adapters. It’s going to be a long night.
“What do you mean, ‘Why do I need that stack of old ThinkPads?’. They were free!”
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.
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
Also: Openwrt is a kind of Linux. That can be useful sometimes, when I need 10 custom wifi routers…
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 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.
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
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 can vibe code your config so now you have no excuse
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?
You’d be a fool to leave them!
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
I’d like to know where can i put my hand on a stack of free Thinkpads.
It’s been a couple of weeks since i switched to mint and gotta tell you that this is very tempting
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The things I could do with 160GB of RAM 😭 finally could load my entire database at once instead of hard drive thrashing
The sound of old HDD’s grinding away when I make a query is a very special type of music. Should call it clunkcore or something like that.
At least you remember where you put them :-|
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?
If only the offer wasn’t long gone by now… ;_;
160GB ram for 20 bucks… I’d have taken that regardless
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What if I like being the clown?
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
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.
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!
This is the life I want for myself.
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.
What’s the oldest?
So far 2008-2009. Waiting to find some quality beige cases lol
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.
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.
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.
Could set it up as a fileserver
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…
They are bloody spectacular for programming arduino or flashing your 3D printer.
II 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 >:)
It has a fingerprint sensor?
Yes, i haven’t used it but its quite the oddity
