My wife has asked me not to turn the house into a tech junkyard.
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.
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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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.
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 $90US from amazon, (I had an unused HDMI monitor), it's amazingly sturdy to use. I want a bit better one now......
They are bloody spectacular for programming arduino or flashing your 3D printer.
I started my Linux journey as a poor high school college student and while I got hand-me-down windows machines at home, I worried about breaking them fiddling with things beyond my knowledge level. A budget basement eeePC became my workbench and I started tinkering. I had to drive to the next city to find one in stock. Today the gas would cost more than the computer. :-D
I'd still be running the eee but it got put in the closet when many distros dropped 32 bit support.
Could set it up as a fileserver
I could :)
But these days I have actual servers to do server things (2x HP Gen 8 Microservers which I saved from e-waste) so my little eee is kept only for love and nostalgia.
What? Donβt look at me like that! I totally need 70 computers! Yes theyβre useful! They all have their purpose! That one? Its job is to be force-fed whatever weird obscure Linux distribution I just heard of! Oh, that one? Thatβs for testing Arch Linux configs on 25 year old hardware!
"What do you mean, 'Why do I need that stack of old ThinkPads?'. They were free!"
I'd like to know where can i put my hand on a stack of free Thinkpads.
Who needs virtual machines when I can just use a separate device for every distro I want to try?
Very true. Also, redundancy
Why would I need an enterprise router if I can have a superfast, very extendable, very flexible and redundant router with two old desktop machines?
Power efficiency.
that's like stage 7-8, after an extremely high electric bill. Also about that time you consider moving to a colder climate so the electronics can just heat your house.
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Where are you all getting free thinkpads from?
We are trash pandas at your next companys trash bin. They follow like minions M$ 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).
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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.
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There's about to be a lot more surplus hardware since Microsoft arbitrarily decided they can't update to Windows 11.
And real good specs on most those machines, most will be at least DDR4 some even DDR5
My mom's laptop self "upgraded" to win 11 a while back and she hates it and has been having issues nonstop. And since she refuses to pay a monthly subscription for office I set her up with Libre office. She's been resistant to Linux but as I slowly add more FOSS apps she's coming around. She's now willing to try a Linux Mint live USB.
I'm going to be on the lookout for one of these perfectly good laptops and throw Mint on it for her so she can keep her windows laptop until she's ready to fully make the switch.
if you want a LOT of them, govdeals.com is a way to go. You might hate me for showing you that place. Its how I ended up with a great generator for my house as well as too many servers.
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Those images are in the wrong direction.
Madness? Buying a new computer every 2 years because the OS vendor is in cahoots with hardware manufacturers is madness. This is rational usage of resources for your benefit.
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Windows: creates e-waste
Linux: undoes e-waste
Windows: creates e-waste
Linux: collects e-waste under the stairs "just in case it's useful"
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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!
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Getting visibly annoyed whe you find out you can't easily run mainline linux on some proprietary piece of hardware like a phone or smart TV.
But hey at least my robot vacuum runs on Ubuntu by default lol.
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Buy e-waste? I have people give it to me for free. Offer to recycle it for them.
The classic
offers to recycle
actually installs esoteric Linux distros
Classic!
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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.
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I
I 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 >:)
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I started at the bottom with ewaste, it is truly amazing what companies will just throw away because they don't want to deal with it.
I am really looking forward to picking up some cheap used mini PCs here in a few months after the market gets flooded from corporates disposing of their old hardware because of the Windows 10 end of life. Consumers have already started ditching them now, but it takes a minute for enterprise to get it to a disposal company who then gets to pawn it off on the used market and that's the good stuff.
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Iβm pretty certain at this point that Iβm about to be forced to buy some programming socks.
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Unless you have an Asus m32cd_a_f_k20cd_k31cd motherboard. I've tried EVERY bloody configuration in the bios possible and several different distros, and they all crash / freeze during installation. Fuck you Asus π€¬
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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