Goodbye Windows, Hello Linux
this is literally E-waste
Reminds me what Spotify did with the Spotify car thingThose have a decent aftermarket though. Spotify at least issued refunds, so there’s that.
Oh
Just switched to Linux Mint. So worth it
Good luck on your journey! It can be frustrating at times, but please feel free to make posts asking for help if you can’t find it online!
Appreciate it! I’ll be sure to do that. Between here and some old Reddit posts, I’ve found a lot of useful stuff on getting started
I love how in a world where we banned straws we are somehow OK with Microsoft pushing people to recycle their old but otherwise adequate system for what, to the vast majority of people, are some paper thin security advantages.
Anybody who asks me about Windows 10’s EOL date will be introduced to the option of using Linux before i’ll help them select a replacement system. Especially if they literally only use a browser there really is no reason to go through hoops or spend money to stick with Windows.
I love how in a world where we banned straws
We didn’t. If anything, we are in a world where we banned banning straws, because even this trivial token concession was considered a Violation of Our Fundamental Freedoms. Media personalities screaming and nashing their teeth over straws was a PR stunt by petrochemical companies to backstop any kind of radical anti-plastic reforms.
Anybody who asks me about Windows 10’s EOL date will be introduced to the option of using Linux before i’ll help them select a replacement system.
Cheers to this.
paper thin security advantages.
And loads of highly intrusive, unremovable, anti-user bullshit.
Just think of how few user metrics they get out of Windows 10 though!
Won’t someone please think of the metrics?!
We’ve lost to climate change already. Can’t even get people to wear a mask. Asking them to completely change their polluting lifestyles? Impossible. What we do instead is ban plastic straws to pretend were doing something. Reality doesn’t matter, just how people feel.
We very clearly haven’t already lost, otherwise the world would have ended. You and I wouldn’t be having this discussion, we’d be cobbling together what bits of food we could to survive.
Stop this mindset, it’s destructive and foolish - human beings have the capability of overcoming this. If people with this mindset were asked to dive into the cooling tanks at the Chernobyl incident - we, as a species, would actually be fucked.
We have. Our ship’s course is set. The systems we have in place are too entrenched in their destruction. I remember when the Paris agreement was signed and everyone was talking about how we need to cut emissions now or never. What did we do as a species? Increase energy demands across the board and keep the status quo, and those demands just keep rising higher and higher.
“Trade it in or recycle it” basically means “your best bet to solve this problem is to pass it on to someone else, who will pass it on to someone else, and so on until it arrives at landfill”.
Trade it in to who? Who’s buying PCs that can’t be used? I mean there’s the retro market, but AFAIK they aren’t buying anything after Windows XP.
People who want to boot other things on it than Windows
That’s true, but the supply vastly outstrips the demand. They may make great Linux machines, but the majority of 10-15 year old computers have little to no economic value.
I am running a plex server on a 2013 lenovo booted with elementaryOS. I used a 2009 Mac mini prior. They don’t all need to become e-waste after 10 years, let alone the typical 5 years or so many people throw their stuff out at.
You can also turn basically any old machine into a video game emulation station.
Why would you want to though? I can understand the retro market because there is software like games that either won’t run very well, or won’t run at all on modern hardware. I’m in the market for a ‘powerful’ machine circa 2003-2005 for that exact reason.
When it comes to machines made in 2015? I’m not sure there’s a lot you can run on those machines that you couldn’t on modern hardware, apart from Windows 11.
I guess you could use them for things like media servers, but it would have to be phenomenally cheap, as in cheaper than cheap modern hardware.
Personally, my rule is a 10 year gap is old, a 20 year gap is retro.
Did you edit your comment?
I use a 2013 Lenovo X1 Carbon with a damaged screen as a plex server thanks to Elementary OS. It would’ve been e-waste years ago in different hands. Frankly it’s a shame people don’t realize how easy it is to boot something like elementary and set up a Plex server. You can be up and running in about 45 minutes and you never have to touch a terminal command.
There are tons of uses for old hardware. You just don’t know them. Pretty much any old computer can be turned into a video game emulation station.
People who know that the computers can still be used.
Well at least the second hand laptop market will be flooded by the companies deciding to upgrade to newer laptops for Win11, so a small upside.
This is incredibly infuriating and I’d honestly consider it ecoterrorism and abusive.
The ONLY thing I still apparently need Windows for is running OPL Manager and HDL Batch Installer for my Playstation 2 hard drives. Can anyone point me in a direction of Linux alternatives? I managed to get WinHiip running in Wine, but it can’t see the PS2 HDD from Wine. Pretty sure I need something that runs native, and for the life of me I cannot find anything. Which is really surprising to me.
Back whe I used OPL, OPL-PC-Tools worked fine. OPL Manager specifically also ran fine under wine for me.
If you find the time you could do some testing under a live media enviroment, I recommend Linux Mint if you haven’t tested it already :)
I’ll definitely check out OPL-PC-Tools, thanks! HDL Batch Installer just hangs on open, checking for updates. I have been running Mint since November. I can’t get OPL manager to launch at all. Regular Wine, Proton, nothing. I’ve tried brand new prefixes with fresh .NET runtime, it just refuses to start.
I did a clean wine install and could confirm that OPL Manager indeed does not launch, which is kinda intriguing to me, since it did work with me about 2 years ago, this user also reported it working (in 2016) , maybe something changed along the way and it broke? I’ll try to make it work when I get another chance :P Unless OPL-PC-Tools proves to be good enough to replace it for ya
About HDL Batch Installer, I personally never used it, so I’m not sure on how it works and all, BUT, with some research it seems like HDL Batch is just a frontend for HDL Bump, while Batch is windows only, there seems to be an alternative frontend for Linux, called HDL Dump Helper but I did not test it nor do I got a ps2 right now to do so. Wish you best of luck 😁
Well, I’ll give that a try, too then. Thanks for investigating! At least it’s not just me that can’t get it to work.
Use Linux. And dont listen to zealts who say its not a viable option. Its actually way ahead than Windows or Macos
Its actually way ahead than Windows or Macos
Man you need to qualify the hell out of this. As a Linux users there are definitely things MacOS and Windows can not only do better but sometimes at all. I also think people need to not gloss over the fact that the tech literacy floor is noticeably higher. Just knowing what your machine can run out the box can be a task. Most people really know absolutely nothing about how computers work
Right? People don’t think about the years (decades in some cases) that they spent learning Windows in order for them to be as comfortable with it as they are.
For those people, learning Linux should not take very long and once you do you will realize that it is superior in literally every way.
Devils advocate. The m{1,4} chips are nice.
Depends what you do on your computer.
Macs are amazing and unique and, at the same time, extremely infuriating and very expensive.
And dont listen to zealts who say its not a viable option.
It is a viable option, especially for old hardware. I mainly don’t use it because I want to install an OS exactly once: When the computer is brand new. This is exactly when some shit is not working properly on Linux. But if you have old hardware, it will run no problems. Just install Ubuntu and Libre Office on it, pray that you get the printer set up, done.
“pray you get the printer set up” is more of a windows thing. For ten years, over three versions of windows, I couldn’t get printing to work reliably. Switched to Linux, no problems since
Also, the new hardware thing is not really true anymore. Most things are supported from the get-go, or at least within a few weeks
I also never had a problem. Neither under windows nor under linux. The problem usually occurs within the printer. The more urgently you need to print a document, the more likely your printer is gonna jam. I suspect those things are so crappy in order to keep IT support companies afloat.
The more urgently you need to print a document, the more likely your printer is gonna jam
This really is some kind of law of the universe.
Glad those tariffs hit just in time
Im so glad I fully switched to Linux a year ago. Never going back to Windows.
I have to use Windows 11 on my work machine and it reminds me every day why I will never go back.
I opened the process manager a week or two ago for the first time in a while, and holy shit how do people live like that??? If it were my personal laptop, I would have had a fucking aneurysm trying to figure out what the fuck all that shit was.
i’ve been on linux on and off since 1998, however I fully switched about 5 years ago and never looked back.
I was curious around 3 months ago, between distro swapping and I installed W11. It lasted 2h until I rage installed linux and took me an entire day to wash the windows taste off. bleah…
Same
Same
There is a way to circumvent the checker. I can’t remember what we did. It was like disable TPM maybe? If folks want to install W11 on their old computer.
You can by placing a registry key IIRC. But if you do that then you’ll run into issues installing later builds of Win11 and cumulative updates, meaning your system will be just as unpatched (security risk) as windows 10 in a few months.
If you care enough to do an unsupported upgrade for security updates, you truly should look into using Linux instead, like Mint
You can but it’s finicky as hell. Definitely more than what the vast majority of users can do, and if they cared they would make an official easy way to do it. But they don’t want you to, they want you to buy a new computer
Hold on to your butts.
Big influx of Linux-compatible office PCs hitting eBay soon.
You can literally buy new thinkpads with ubuntu pre installed for $140 dollars off the price of a windows PC
Oh I misread that and thought you said they thinkpads themselves were $140 lol
That’s cool, but a lot of people (myself included) aren’t able to justify a brand new laptop. I can absolutely afford a new laptop…I just have no desire to buy one when older ones work just fine and have plenty of life in them.
My current laptop is a T495 that I bought at a flea market two years ago for $100 and it still handles all of my needs completely fine. My kid is using a T470 I bought not too long before that for around the same price, and it does everything he needs too (though it could stand to handle Minecraft JE a bit better…but in fairness he installs nearly every mod he finds and I never really taught him about adjusting settings).
If you aren’t doing high-end gaming or video editing, practically any computer can handle like 95% of other daily home computer tasks.
That said, his laptop speakers are blown…so maybe it’s time I start looking for an upgrade for me. Kids are good for that type of stuff. Still remember convincing my wife we needed to get him a Switch for Christmas…his first Christmas. I wouldn’t buy myself a switch…but for my 5 month old kid? Yeah he needs Breath of the Wild.
I got a Framework a little while back for this reason… The modularity of it means that I can upgrade it piecemeal as needed without having to buy a brand new laptop, or suffer with outdated hardware before I can justify buying a new laptop.
It was not cheap though.
That and/or a big influx of vulnerable unpatched Windows machines…
…that’s why you turn them into Linux machines.
Any unpatched windows machine can be patched into a Linux machine.
Throw it away.
Gently
In my direction
Why gently?
Cause lobbing 25+lbs of hardware at someone is frowned upon most of the time.
Don’t wanna hurt the other person or the computer, duh. After all, a device infested with Windows doesn’t really need to be punished for it.
Also make sure to remove all BIOS passwords first
