My wife has asked me not to turn the house into a tech junkyard.
“What do you mean, ‘Why do I need that stack of old ThinkPads?’. They were free!”
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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Also: Openwrt is a kind of Linux. That can be useful sometimes, when I need 10 custom wifi routers…
I had 11 OSes on a single laptop once, including a vestigial Vista partition that was barely hanging on
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).
Unrelated, but I just took apart my old IBM thinkpad from 2003/2004 to clean it up and get all nice and pretty for it’s last few years of updates. I also did my newer-ish HP laptop from 2016 at the same time.
The thinkpad was just beautifully laid out, with thought put into the placement of vents, heat sinks, heat generating components, alternative air pathways if the entire bottom was blocked, easy maintenance of components, etc.
The HP was …not. The weakest ass heat sink I’ve ever seen, miles away from the processor (no wonder it sounded like a wind tunnel when playing a youtube video). One intake vent where your thigh would be if in your lap and the exhaust right where your knee would be. Extra bonus was the placement of the CPU (running usually 80c+) is right above your junk, the vent being offset from the processor a smidge.
Granted I’m comparing enterprise vs consumer laptop in the days when there was a massive difference in quality between the two, but damn, this experience has me decided (again) that internal layout and design is just as important as specs, even more so if you need more powerful components.
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.
Seed some of Anna’s archive’s torrents. You can help preserve all of humanity’s knowledge with those
And just think how quickly you can get them all up and running with NixOS! All those endless hours of learning finally put to good use!
Beats contributing to the documentation/wiki. /s
Who needs documentation? The code is self-documenting! The entire thing’s on GitHub, just check the issues to figure out what’s going on! Didn’t work? Sorry, the thing got broke a few months ago. Just go through the commit history and I’m sure you’ll be up and running in no time!
I’ve also made a module that fixes your specific issue and uploaded it to my self hosted gitlab instance. The server is down right now? Well, isn’t that better? Now you can make the thing yourself! Remember to upload your thing to your GitHub, name it something like “nixos” and never mention it anywhere.
Just put my custom flake into your inputs! No, I won’t give ydu an example on how to integrate it into your config. The Flakes schema is an incredibly easy concept to grasp, after all. /s
Well, if you can’t figure out how to integrate the flake in 30 seconds by month 6, you clearly have a skill issue. Or a “sleeping at night instead of writing nix” issue. Better use a noob-friendly distro like arch.
Seriously though, despite all the flaws, there is no other packaging system where I can as painlessly use random forks of packages. I absolutely love how I’m able to run gnome-mobile on my x64 tablet. True to the NixOS way, I found the overlay on someone’s GitHub, there were only the files, no further instructions.
I also have a USB with live debian at all times, because you never know when you stumble upon a thing that just can’t work with NixOS
I really dig it as well, but hoo boy: the documentation still is… incredibly rough.
I’ve spent several evenings now trying to set up the development environment for a python package with additional binary file requirements (model weights) that I want to be included in the package.
It kinda works now with pyproject-nix, but I can’t manage to get an editable devshell running. And now it needs to unpack the requs everytime. 🙄
You can vibe code your config so now you have no excuse
What do you mean the entire thing broke a few months ago? It broke only weeks ago, NixOS has the freshest breakages in the linux ecosystem
Who cares if it breaks? You can always just boot a previous generation! Need to rebuild without the breakage? You surely must now how to add a package from an earlier commit via flakes by now, right?
I’m just waiting for the moment I can update my packages (when all the unstable builds get updated)
You’d be a fool to leave them!
I’d like to know where can i put my hand on a stack of free Thinkpads.
Those images are in the wrong direction.
What if I like being the clown?
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.
OS vendor is in cahoots with hardware manufacturers
That’s pretty much the strategy since Microsoft has been established. It’s not very creative, it’s not even legal, so it’s impressive (in a bad way) that they manage to keep on making it work.
it’s not even legal
Isn’t there one that has both, the OS vendor and the hardware seller as a same entity?
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”
All the computers living under the stairs are running some server function. 🤷♂️
They’re heating the room too so technically it’s a radiator with network attached storage!
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
This is what gave me the idea. I started watching videos of people doing this with recycled hardware, and it looks so fun.
Buy e-waste? I have people give it to me for free. Offer to recycle it for them.
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.
And Taco Bell drive thru, apparently
I
Fuck it, we ball
F
Wait really?
Yeah on Roborock at least, dunno if they changed distros for newer robots though.
Oh wow and it comes with Matter support for local server use!!!
My 1 dollar vacuum I got at a thrift store is still chugging somehow.
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!
I have 3 old cellphones that for the life of me, no matter how hard I tried - couldn’t install an alt android OS on it
One device was compatible - but I couldn’t unlock the boot loader
One device was never tested against any alt OSes
One device was carrier locked.
I also have one old Galaxy Tab that I spent weeks trying to flash another ROM to it - and it fails every time.
I’m 0/4 on trying to reanimate old android hardware - it’s just too difficult and too much hoops to go through.
At least I’m fairly capable with installing Linux on old laptops - and given that a new wave of Win11 compatible laptops is coming - I’ll get to do it more frequently soon.
I haven’t tried to do LUKS yet, and I’m dying to get my hands on a Yubikey and learn what I can make it do.
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II 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 >:)
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.
A combination of warranty expiry, the tenancy to replace instead of repair/upgrade, Windows 10 being the go to, even after W11 launched, and the W10 end of life, all combine into a neat pile of ewaste from enterprises that’s flooding the market.
It’s a great time for those of us that use enterprise company discards as computers.
Yes! Gotta figure out the new models, hopefully it will be some good times. I just love being 5 years after, at a fraction of the price.
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.
Before the arbitrary Windows 11 hardware restrictions, this was exactly what was happening on the Windows side as well. There are still tons of 10-15yo Windows devices around, happily running Win10.
“Regular” people also only upgrade their PC once the old one breaks or if they really encounter something that doesn’t work on the old PC (mostly games if they do play somewhat modern games).
In fact, Windows used to have really awesome long-term-support and forever long upgrade support. You can easily run Win10 on a quality high-performance PC from 2008. But with Win11, they just tossed all that in the drain.
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.
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.
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.
Does anyone have a few optiplexes lying around?
My favorite dependable cheap Linux host. Just sucks about the power draw.
The little ones are great
The desktop ones are great for storage arrays, especially with an LSI controller thrown in.
The thinkcentres replaces them well IMO, the tiny is a monster, it’s now my daity driver (6600T IIRC, 32GB, 2TB + a rust spinner) amazing and the power draw is way less than my old optiopexes.
my workplace is selling a few optiplex 3040-s with i3-6100, 4gigs of ram of unqualified variety, 120gb ssd, 512 gb hdd, for about 55$, is that a good deal? (this is in hungary btw)
I never exactly paid for any. Didn’t exactly steal. Didn’t exactly pay. I’d call it “appropriate”
I’ve seen worse deals. The platform itself is probably worth that much (meaning the mainboard, chassis, and all the accompanying stuff like heatsinks and power supplies)… 6th gen CPUs are probably dirt cheap, assuming those systems use a socketed CPU, and you wanted to upgrade to something more than an i3. I can’t imagine RAM would be much more.
You can probably turn these into very decent little machines for under $100 each and a bit of effort.
It really depends on whether you need the extra capability for a bit of effort or you’re fine with the i3 with 4G RAM.
I usually want to replace the storage on a used system with something new or refurbished because of wear and tear, but that’s me. Still, that’s not a bad deal. Free would be a great deal, but I’m not sure you could ask for better.
Dude I have my childhood desktop running a jellyfin server, I’d kill for an optiplex
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.
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 🤬
That is a cursed name for a motherboard.
Gramps went musk off with giving weird names.
Sounds OEM
Would you rather Gaming Extreme MAX Torpedo Super Champ Grand Prix Haxx 2020 Ultra MAX Elite ?
Just because you have OS install media and hardware does not mean the hardware functions. In fact, old hardware often fails MEMTST.
I’m sure that is often the case. But with this series, Its this specific model. A friend of mine has the Asus M32 from the previous year and he was able to get mint installed without any issues. Just bad luck with the model I bought. It’s always given me headaches so not being able to switch to linux tracks
Have you tried LibreBoot? Is that still a project?
My go to for reliable Linux platforms is anything off-lease. Workstation class systems are extremely robust most of the time. I have some that have been in 24/7 operation since I bought them years ago and they’re showing zero signs of slowing down. I love it.
Ewaste is also a good place to look for still good but deemed unworthy of use by a faceless, soulless corporation stuff. Usually tends to be a bit older, but it’s usually fine.
Have fun friends, there’s no wrong answers.
Have fun friends, there’s no wrong answers.
Sadly, there is though: as nice and fascinating as it is to get a usable computer out of vintage hardware - sometimes the power consumption is too bad to justify not recycling the hardware :(
This is a completely valid concern. I recently moved my homelab from core 2 era xeons (not second Gen core i-series… Core2), over to Xeon E5 v4 processors. I looked today and the systems take about the same amount of power, but now instead of six cores, I have 10, and they’re newer, faster in every way…
Power draw didn’t change but now I can run something like 3-4x the workloads, which means I can cut the size by 1/3rd and I would drop power consumption and gain more computing power.
There is absolutely a limit to what’s useful. You won’t find anyone running a Pentium 3 anymore, even with Linux. It’s just not sensible.
I’d argue that anything core i-series 4th Gen or older, probably needs to be decommissioned soon, if not already. Most of the workloads that you could use that stuff for can easily be handled by a raspberry Pi, which will use less than 1/10th the power to do it.
Basically, if what you’re doing can be 100% completed in whole on a pi, either you need to upgrade, or simply move it to a pi. Simple as that. Anything else is just burning power and heating your home with little benefit.
