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.
Even 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.
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.
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 :)
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?
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 understand that people need to be a bit more tech savvy to use Linux over windows but I reckon that KDE for example is really similar to windows (but actually much much better) and with the ai chatbots we currently have available I reckon any non-tech users would be able solve most of the issues with the chatbot’s help
Only tech savvy for installing an OS, other than that Linux is a better experience for less tech savvy users. My wife struggled with Windows and how things don’t make sense (it was also slow) so I setup nixOS with GNOME, no more complaints
Does your wife install packages with NixOS? This is one of the few distros I tried (and now main) that I genuinely cannot recommend to anyone not willing to spend days learning the lang & concepts.
No, she is very bad with tech. I have added everything she needs for her web, email, spreadsheet, zoom call use. NixOS is super easy for an average person who can edit a text file though. You go to this site https://search.nixos.org/packages , search what you want, it gives you the code to paste into your config, and run a rebuild…or options for a temp install. Seems painless.
Good point… I tend to give family members Flatpak-based distros like Fedora for the nice app store experience, but I guess if you can get past the scaryness of test editing and rebuilding with a console, NixOS does come with the benefit of having waaaay more packages and much easier rollback. My poor father trying to run nvidia drivers on Fedora Kinoite, who has to rebuild the kernel for every package install…
I’m tech savvy, been in IT for nearly 40 years. Wrote my first program in Fortran on punched cards.
Linux is no easy switchover. It’s problematic, regardless of the distro (I’ve tried many over the years).
My latest difficulty - went to install Debian and it hung multiple times trying to install wifi drivers.
Mint can’t use my Logitech mouse until I researched it and discovered someone wrote an app to enable it. The most popular mouse on the planet doesn’t work out of the box.
Typical user would be stumped by these problems.
I can go on for days about “Year of the Linux Desktop” (which I first heard in 2000). Can Linux work as a desktop? Definitely. And it can be pretty damn good, too, if your use-case aligns with it’s capabilities. But if you’re an end-user type, what do you do a year in and realize you need a specific app that just doesn’t exist in Linux?
Is it a direct replacement for Windows? No. Because Windows has always been about general use - it trades performance for the ability to do a lot of varied things, it includes capabilities that not everyone needs.
Linux is the opposite, it’s about performance for specific things. If you want a specific capability, it has to be added. This is the challenge these different distros attempt to meet: the question for all of them is which capabilities to include “out of the box” (see my mouse example - Debian handles it just fine).
This is also the power of Linux, and why it’s so great for specific use-cases. Things like Proxmox, TrueNAS, etc, really benefit from this minimalism. No wasted cycles on a BITS service or all the other components Windows runs “just in case”.
I am sorry that you have had this much trouble, but I cannot agree that this experience is as typical as you are making it out to be. For me, the experience has always been that I install Linux and it Just Works out of the box, save for some things like printer/scanner drivers which you generally also need to download on Windows. Furthermore, it is far more pleasant as a desktop experience than Windows.
(In fairness, though, I completely agree with you that Windows has more capabilities than Linux, given all of the advertisements it insists on showing me.)
+1. I do believe the user you are replying to but I believe you too. People can have different experiences without lying or being disingenuous. I’m probably more tech-savvy than the average user but far below average for programming.dev or a Linux community. For me, Linux Just Works out of the box, but I admit I’m on a gaming-specific distro (Nobara, a Fedora derivative) and I’m only using it to be a gaming computer. Sometimes it opens a web browser. Art, music, programming, printing all happen somewhere else (my Mac).
Just to be clear: my criticism is not that the other commenter was lying or being disingenuous about their own experiences, but that they made sweeping generalizations in their comment.
Thanks for explaining, I didn’t think you were insinuating that they were lying at all! I may have been overly influenced by another comment
Ah! Yes, I see where you were coming from now.
One-click Linux cluster. Local compute, NAS, or self-hosting. Be a shame if it all ended in landfill.
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.
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 SCP+ 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…
One thing I wonder about Linux is the OOBE for new users. A lot of Linux distros have you create the user and whatnot when you install the OS; it’s not always intuitive on making a new user account to personalize. It’d make it a lot easier to preinstall distros and then let the user deal with finishing setup to their needs.
At least Mint has an OEM install; on the first boot after installing the system, it asks you to create a user (plus language, layout etc.). I never used it though, but I expect other distros to have a similar feature.
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.
Looking at the used market where I live, quite a large number of laptops are already sold with Windows 11 installed even when officially unsuported. Activated with MAS as well, probably.
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.
I really hope people decide to leave windows finally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
sounds like an easy choice
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?
