in reply to Andy Fletcher

@skjeggtroll @X31Andy
Yikes, I remember those days. Had one customer suffer dozens of busted open PCs. And they weren't gentle about it. Lots of collateral damage. We (tiny accounts software house with a sideline selling PCs and installs) also got broken into. MD was cross none of the office doors were locked. The next time, they found locked doors, so kicked through them all. Cost 10x as much to fix it all.
in reply to Adrian Sanabria

soldered RAM has upsides like better bandwidth, especially in the DDR5 era. I'm so glad I bought a maxed out T14s gen 6 AMD right before the shortages started. I was intentionally avoiding slotted RAM in my upgrade because I'd rather have faster memory and I would've maxed it out as soon as possible anyway. SODIMMs need to go in the mobile space, they just can't get the necessary signal integrity and take up extra space, and there are alternatives out there on the horizon that solve these issues. On destkop side, DDR5 has been a nightmare to deal with and it took years for CPU vendors to write proper code to train and handle RAM that doesn't cause multi minute training times at random and even a shot at faster speeds.
in reply to Tofu ​

@tofu
"the headphone jack NEEDS to go"
"X11 NEEDS to go"
"slotted ram NEEDS to go"

I respect this kind of opinions but I'd rather have the choice. Not everyone needs ultra low latency, one of my workstations still uses DDR3 and for my tasks (programming, Internet surfing, music/photo management and general productivity) works very well.

in reply to Adrian Sanabria

I run a non profit called the Computer Upcycle Project where we are getting in donation computers directly from organizations and individuals, upcycling them with Linux and donating them back out the community.

So far we've been lucky, as we're actually purposely aiming for win 8/10 (and intel macs) that are "unsupported". For us, 4-8 gigs of ram is a good sweet spot.

I hope this doesnt start happening to us!

in reply to Adrian Sanabria

Computers on the low end of the market work perfectly with Linux and their memory won't be interesting.

Last year I bought a low end laptop* to replace one of the two +10 year old (15 by now?) laptops I use.

Just keep the oldies running on Linux!

* and its running on Linux of course

This entry was edited (2 days ago)

Cory Doctorow reshared this.

in reply to 🇪🇺 Paul Schoonhoven 🍋🍉

@vosje62 @codemonkeymike TBH modern machines are overpowered for what they actually have to do. I blame the sheer inefficiency of the OS and software, and the fact that most of the functionality of both has been dictated by Marketing rather than by any analysis of what users actually do with it. It's feature design straight out of The Marching Morons.
in reply to 🇪🇺 Paul Schoonhoven 🍋🍉

@vosje62 @codemonkeymike I have started doing this through our local Repair Cafe. My first session was in September last year and I was amazed at (and swamped by) the demand. So many old Windows 7 - 10 machines out there ripe for the upgrading. We have also started a local support group, so the new Linux converts are not left in the cold.
in reply to Adrian Sanabria

@vosje62 @codemonkeymike Repair Cafe is a global movement. Here is a link to their Web site. repaircafe.org/en/

Carolyn reshared this.

in reply to Adrian Sanabria

@vosje62 @codemonkeymike You are correct to be concerned about "clients" data loss. We make sure that clients fully understand that they must copy all data they wish to keep to an external medium. We get them to sign a declaration that they understand the risks.
And yes, it can be time-consuming, especially as you need to provide follow-up support for a while. It's unfair to convert a non-techie person's computer to a new OS and then leave them to fend for themselves. I am retired, so have the gift of time.
On the other hand, it's very rewarding to turn someone's piece of junk into a useful device and free them from corporate capture. And I have met some really nice people as a result.
in reply to 🇪🇺 Paul Schoonhoven 🍋🍉

@vosje62 @codemonkeymike
Desktops do better than laptops in this regard. I'm only on my 4th CPU/motherboard pair since '97.

Even my work desktop is from 2014, but I've nicked loads of RAM & an SSD from other obsolete machines to upgrade it. Unfortunately I occasionally need to use Windows, and it won't run 11 (10 is slow, Xubuntu is quick)

But my 2017 4GB Lenovo Yoga laptop is pretty limited even with Debian+XFCE

in reply to Adrian Sanabria

this is a problem and the while #Greedflation and #AIbubble needs to be stopped and burst right now.

in reply to Adrian Sanabria

As others are saying, Linux, or even BSD for that matter, is perfect for squeezing old life out of new hardware, regardless of whether you intend to 'stick it' to MS or not; and the way things are going right now, it's particularly welcome to see GCN-era graphics getting practically spoiled by Mesa lately in terms of support; as of the 6.19 kernel, GCN1 and GCN2 will default to using AMDGPU instead of the legacy radeon driver, and GCN3 and newer has always supported AMDGPU natively, and in addition, all five generations of GCN, to include GCN1-3, as well as Polaris and Vega, are still getting actively updated in the Mesa stack, and modern Vulkan is supported all the way back to GCN1 via that stack, granted GCN1-3 are limited to Vulkan 1.3 while AFAIK Polaris and Vega can do Vulkan 1.4, but still.