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?
Sometimes you have to meet people where they are with something familiar, I’m guessing?
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.
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.
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
Libre Office 5.2 seems to have been released in August 2016.
And a reverse image search shows the picture of at least as old as 2017
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.
It’s a poor spec for a phone, let alone a PC.
Sometimes it’s best just to scrap it.
5 minutes ago I was gaming on my 2gb Windows XP machine.
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))
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 :)
“Ewww, Ubuntu? Honey, don’t touch it. We’re an Arch family.”
-No one ever
“We use Arch in this house, BTW”
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
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.
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.
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.
Heroes don’t all wear capes!
No Capes!
No capes, for reason for reason, on Tux
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.
I know it’s not much to criticise over, but it takes like 4-5 restarts to install windows, and one to install most linux distros.
These days I would pair that with Debian and IceWM
This is useless. It’s not even high enough spec to run your Electron calculator in a sandboxed container.
/s
2 gigs of ram is going to be incredibly rough in 2025. Linux is better on old hardware but those specs are pretty optimistic.
Dude, a single chrome take is going to nom the fuck out of 2gigs.
That’s correct, but you can use such low end device as your home server with services like PiHole/AdGuardHome, Invidious, Vaultwarden.
One of my low end home lab server is running invidious (YouTube front-end) on Ubuntu server 24 and just using about 900 MB RAM.
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.
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.
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.
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.
