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.
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 🤦♀️
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?
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
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?
I think it’s just that they don’t care about performance. It’s been the case for a while that typically games run faster on Linux through WINE/Proton despite using a translation layer.
And there’s a bunch of background services taking up memory and CPU on Windows that are hard to turn off.
As a company, Microsoft doesn’t reward anyone for improving the performance of the OS. That should be enough of an explanation 😆.
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.
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?
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.
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.
What is unreasonable about 4 gb of ram, a processor made in the last decade, and a tpm chip? Even Linux doesn’t run well under 8, let alone 4, because linux’s memory management and handling of low memory is a catastrophic embarrassment. (Yes it uses less idle, but you get to 80% and the system will lock up)
Linux runs just fine in 4. Or much less. It depends a lot on what you use it for. My 486 had a whooping 32 Megs of memory and ran Linux just fine.
Regarding MS, the main problem is the changing of the goalpost. And I’m not so sure there’s even any point to the whole TPM thing anyway.
Well if we’re going to just talk about the kernel with 1-2 embedded apps, sure.
or if you’re going back to 1990 yes, applications back then we’re less demanding than chrome. However that was 35 years ago.
But this article isn’t about your little nxp chip or the much weaker 486 chip, it’s about laptops humans are using with like…modern web browsers. Which will happily eat 10 gb of ram if you let them. And then Linux will shit the bed and lock up the moment you’re out of swap or zram.
I have no idea what you mean by moving goalposts.
The TPM attitude is common among Linux fanboys and I don’t really get it. It’s a chip for making security simpler for the average user. If you’re worried about laptops getting trashed because users won’t install Linux, the tpm chip is for them. Also it’s over a decade old.
Whether or not an older machine “runs well” is highly dependent on what you’re using it for. I only very recently (like, after the new year) retired a 16-year-old laptop with 2GB RAM that was running Gentoo, when I got a good deal on something that would compile gcc in a reasonable amount of time rather than needing to be left to run overnight. However, most people don’t need to compile large software on a regular basis, and the old machine was still doing okay in its role as a large-screen-coarse-resolution pseudo-video-iPod, ssh client, quick lookup device for Perl manpages, emergency Internet query device, and general backup/light-use system. Worthless for gaming and somewhat sluggish on the Web, naturally, but that wasn’t what I needed it for.
I’d expect anything with 4GB RAM and 4 CPU threads to produce somewhat acceptable performace on most individual webpages (multiple Javascript-heavy sites might be a challenge, though, so stick to 1-2 tabs at a time), which would make the main issue most people would have with my old laptop disappear.
The TPM chip is the issue here, and not a requirement under Linux.
TPM chip is a decade old, built into all but shit laptops, and is a net positive for overall system security.
Id argue it’s more than not required under Linux, it’s barely supported under Linux and is a giant pain to get working.
The technical requirements for 11 were reasonable
My 8700k (from 2018) disagrees.
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”
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.
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 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 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.
… 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’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?
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.
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.
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 really hope people decide to leave windows finally.
One-click Linux cluster. Local compute, NAS, or self-hosting. Be a shame if it all ended in landfill.
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
