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.
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?
I really hope people decide to leave windows finally.
sounds like an easy choice
How much ewaste has Microsoft caused just by wanting to sell more copies of the next version of windows.
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.
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.
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.
Windows 10 can be updated for free to 11. This is only impacting the ewaste laptops that some vendors sell. Like the ones with 64 gb storage or 4-8 gb of ram or no tpm chip… All of which are roughly as shit as each other.
This also affects laptops with anything up to a 7th gen i7 and any amount of RAM and storage. Even if they have the correct TPM version. On a technical level, these devices are absolutely capable of running Windows 11, Microsoft just didn’t wanna.
They said when they launched windows 10 it would be “last version”
The counter is that all of a sudden instead of windows 10 it was 10 from 2020, then 10 from 2022 and so on. Instead of only being the last version it became a succession of short lived versions that people still weren’t upgrading.
They don’t need to support Windows 10, they just need to not artificially block the installation of Windows 11 on old hardware.
Is it an artifical block or is windows 11 just so bloated that it can’t run correctly on older hardware?
both
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.
The technical requirements for 11 were reasonable when it came out and even more so today. Laptops being ewaste when they were built that way isn’t Microsoft’s fault.
They’re the ones that keep making the requirements more and more unreasonable with every update.
Install Linux on them and give them to school children so they can go to school online and not have to worry about being shot. I also see a lot of lithium in that pile.
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.
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?
Some people has had issues with the moderation tools for meetings and connection to shared work files and note books via web, although the people having issues where on Chromebooks so might be different with Edge
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.
My wife’s 90 year old grandma was able to pick up Mint with absolutely no issue. Just put the shit she needed on the desktop and that was that.
I did that for my grandmother with FreeBSD many moons ago, on a Pentium3 no less. It ran for years and years like a champ. Booted straight into PySol since that was pretty much all she ever did on a computer.
PySolBSD :)
Even someone who has only used Windows can figure out those basics on a Linux desktop.
You’d think…
Edge is on Linux (bottom of the page). Throw a windoze skin on KDE and it would be like they never left.
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 🤦♀️
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.
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.
… 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…
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no action at a distance in quantum mechanics, that is a laymen’s misconception. If there was, it would not be compatible with special relativity, but it is compatible as they are already unified under the framework of quantum field theory. The No-communication theorem is a rather simple proof that shows there is no “sharing at a distance” in quantum mechanics. It is an entirely local theory. The misconception arises from people misinterpreting Bell’s theorem which says quantum mechanics is not compatible with a local hidden variable theory, so people falsely conclude it’s a nonlocal theory, but this is just false because quantum mechanics is not a hidden variable theory, and so it is not incompatible with locality. It is a local theory. Bell’s theorem only shows it is nonlocal if you introduce hidden variables, meaning the theorem is really only applicable to a potential replacement to quantum mechanics and is not even applicable to quantum mechanics itself. It is applicable to things like pilot wave theory, but not to quantum theory.
One-click Linux cluster. Local compute, NAS, or self-hosting. Be a shame if it all ended in landfill.
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.
