878
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)
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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Linux
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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
Do we have a rimjob Steve comm?
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.
Then I'd install zoom and chrome (sorry)
You monster...
Chaotic good
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"Ewww, Ubuntu? Honey, don't touch it. We're an Arch family."
-No one ever
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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 :)
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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
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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 $20
Plenty of mem for Xv6
2GB of ram is useless no matter what operating system you put on it.
Ubuntu 16.04
This is an old photo
It's a poor spec for a phone, let alone a PC.
Sometimes it's best just to scrap it.
Libre Office 5.2 seems to have been released in August 2016.
And a reverse image search shows the picture of at least as old as 2017
Edit: still not enough ram. 4gb, maybe, at a minimum, for this type of thing. Even Linux has it's limits if you're trying to get anything done in reasonable time on the modern web
Not sure how 2016 era gnome handled low ram, but I can assure you I was browsing the web just fine on an Ubuntu based lxqt machine around that time
My NAS had 4GB and eventually I maxed it out to 16GB when the pricing for its type of RAM dropped significantly.
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I was able to get Windows 11 to run on a 10 year old laptop through Proxmox. With 3 other Linux OSs running at the same time. With almost no issues. The Win11 system requirements are made up. It’s a way to sell more computers, that’s it. Line go up is all it is.
Yes, but at the end of the day you're still running Windows.
This is exactly how I got into Linux .
Had some... Life troubles.
Started over.
Needed computer.
Local community employment/outreach/social support place had a volunteer run computer place in the basement (they also had a bike place, and a cafe or two, and some apartments, and they were the best community org ever..).
100$
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.
$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.
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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.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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