Sounds like a good way to make use of old eMachines, at a large discount too.
Finally, the year of the Linux Desktop! (eMachine edition)
I’m all about upcycling PCs with Linux, but I think selling a PC with 2GB RAM is going to make Linux look bad. It’s gonna handle its resources better than windows, but 2GB is just too little for today’s standards. It will not run well.
That’s what my NetBook had, back when those were The Thing To Have :)
Combine that will a failing hard drive and you have a train wreck
When quarantines hit and everyone was communicating via zoom, I offered to recycle people’s computers and destroy their old hard drives for free. I’d remove and drill multiple holes through the hard drives, vacuum/dust the computer, install a small, inexpensive HDD, and install Ubuntu.
Then I’d install zoom and chrome (sorry) and then pair each computer with a wired mouse, keyboard, and webcam that I had laying around in bulk. Then I’d drop these computers off at shelters, elder communities, and religious institutions. Essentially, anywhere you’d find someone who didn’t have the means to contact family, attend an interview, or whatever.
Recycling/upcycling old computers isn’t just good for the environment and your investment, it’s good for your community!
You’re doing the lord’s work, fartographer
Eh, I didn’t have much else going on and playing Jackbox remotely with my family made me realize how much others were possibly missing out. I don’t even know if or how those computers were used. I just had a lot of time on my hands and an urge to use my then-new drill. Then, I’d move the equipment out before my wife killed me and then let literally anyone else handle the logistics.
Prior to the pandemic, I’d take 20+ year-old laptops and other equipment to a friend’s ranch and we’d shoot shit. One time, I peppered myself with glass from a CRT after shooting it from a few feet away with a 16 ga.
I’m not directed by charity, I’m just wildly impulsive and occasionally productive.
Do we have a rimjob Steve comm?
Why chrome?
Sometimes you have to meet people where they are with something familiar, I’m guessing?
I guess if there’s also Firefox installed on the computers as a separate alternative browser then I wouldn’t be mad.
Sometimes, designing systems for non-technical people requires a little compromise on the licensing extremism that is very baked into FOSS culture.
It is why most Linux folks are stoked that Linux can play Windows games reliably — it means that millions of Windows lifers are getting exposed to Arch Linux for the first time. Sure, Steam is proprietary, and so are Nvidia drivers, but nobody decides to start with Linux and stay there (they do, but, I am talking single digit numbers vs the billions using Windows). Everyone has to start somewhere.
That said, big frown on Ubuntu. I would personally prefer something like Debian that has fewer major update increments, or an immutable Arch setup.
Mainly because it’s what people knew and expected. “Other” browsers make it too easy to blame user errors on an unfamiliar environment or interface.
But most of all, it’s about picking my battles. I’m there to get employees and volunteers to help vulnerable people get connected and don’t want to get hung up on trying to educate them about privacy and ethics.
Then I’d install zoom and chrome (sorry)
You monster…
Chaotic good
That’s probably okay if all you want to do is browse the web.
But with an Intel celeron you’re not going to get very far even if you do have a more efficient operating system.
I dub thee, sexbox, and she won’t leave me like all the other women did.
Well it is a $20 computer. I can imagine it serving as someone’s introduction to Linux because “why not, it’s cheap enough for an experiment”.
You can get better hardware for free
Go to some companies in your area and ask for some old hardware. They probably have a bunch of 6/7/8th machines. They probably all have 8gb of ram and you can buy cheap sata SSDs that will vastly outperform a old beat up hard drive.
Or not inflicting windows 11 on grandma.
If it’s a grandma it’s going to have to have enough RAM to hold the 984 Chrome tab she assists on having open at any one time. It’s going to need at least a terabyte of RAM.
You can make it work with group policy. I do whatever grandma wants.
Also bold of you to assume grandma is tech illiterate. I’ve met some “grandma age” people who are absolute wizards with tech.
Yeah the grandma I had in mind was the one that only uses her computer for bejeweled and to email you racist memes from Facebook.
*Browse Wikipedia
Oof, the web isn’t as light as it used to be. Some websites won’t even OPEN now with <2GB of RAM. Yes, it is that sloppy.
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Is this a reply to the right comment? I am not sure this makes sense here.
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It’s a 20$ PC. Fair enough, I say.
Not really as you can get quite a lot for not much money
Idk what year that pic was taken, but 2GB of ram is useless no matter what operating system you put on it.
Except ofc for a home nas, but as a desktop, the user is going to open Firefox, try to open a website, it will take minutes to load and the user just wasted $20
More importantly the GPU is going to be unable to process modern graphics which means it will fall to the CPU. The desktop will be very slow and potentially unstable.
My NAS had 4GB and eventually I maxed it out to 16GB when the pricing for its type of RAM dropped significantly.
Mine has 256Mb for steaming audio. Doesn’t use it all even :)
Libre Office 5.2 seems to have been released in August 2016.
And a reverse image search shows the picture of at least as old as 2017
Edit: still not enough ram. 4gb, maybe, at a minimum, for this type of thing. Even Linux has it’s limits if you’re trying to get anything done in reasonable time on the modern web
Not sure how 2016 era gnome handled low ram, but I can assure you I was browsing the web just fine on an Ubuntu based lxqt machine around that time
5 minutes ago I was gaming on my 2gb Windows XP machine.
I just installed my tenth distro on a 2gb netbook, and they all played games of that era just as well as I remember. Just got done playing a map on dawn of war.
I don’t expect these things to play cyberpunk 2077, but if you just want to play stardew valley or terraria it is more than sufficient.
2GB of ram is useless no matter what operating system you put on it.
Ubuntu 16.04
This is an old photo
It’s a poor spec for a phone, let alone a PC.
Sometimes it’s best just to scrap it.
Plenty of mem for Xv6
After reading that, I just checked my memory. After an hour and a half using FF and and a videoplayer (on a reasonably up-to-date Ubuntu 20.x-based XFCE system), I’m using 2.2GB (out of 16, fairly typical, with no swap). So I’m pretty sure that - depending as always on what software they’ve chosen - 2GB is far from ‘useless’. As always, depends on the use case. That’s plenty if you spend most days in a text editor coding.
MS-DOS
I mean, installing alpine is surprisingly simple and is capable of playing HD youtube by modern standards
Important note: alpine is black magic and the comparison I’m making is not really sensical if we take into account that one needs at least some terminal knowledge for alpine, let alone install doas instead of sudo (which is bloaty, as it turns out (for alpine stabdards at least))
runs great on older less powerful hardware
better hardware support, not having to hunt down drivers
I remember installing Linux on my old laptop. It took me half a day to find working drivers for my WiFi card. It’s probably better now but whenever I read stuff like this I call bullshit.
WiFi cards were an iconic problem many years ago.
Nowadays I almost never have issues with WiFi
it’s a lot better now to the point you don’t even need to search for drivers. I can’t even recall the last time I had to search for drivers on Linux, it just has them and some people have even made drivers for the most obscure things that not even windows supports anymore. Hell a couple months ago I found a driver someone made for something called a “Dex Drive” which was an old dongle for Playstation Memory cards.
Linux is 10x easier today. Even running windows programs is a hell of a lot easier and in many cases work the exact same way as on Windows. double click the exe, install it, you’re good to go.
I have had to do it one or two years ago for my previous installation, but that’s because I was using Debian on a computer whose WiFi card does not have open source drivers. But in Ubuntu it worked out of the box, and I think it may work out of the box on Debian too now that they include non free firmware by default.
You only need to install special drivers manually if you use a distro that is a bit “advanced”.
The only wifi that doesn’t work out of the box these days is broadcom cards.
For some reason MediaTek hadn’t released a Linux driver for their popular MT7902. Really annoying. Please sign this petition: https://www.change.org/p/mediatek-should-provide-a-linux-driver-for-mt7902
I learnt that the hard way …
Unless you’re buying the ultra latest laptop of market the chances of that happening should be small. It happened to me once on an MSI 5 years ago where the WiFi driver had a bug and the fix was still on a repo out of tree. Other than that in 15 years of Linux never had an issue
Love the “Installed and tested by Tim G.”
Hey bro you got Tim G. PC too?
Thanks Tim!
2 gigs of ram is going to be incredibly rough in 2025. Linux is better on old hardware but those specs are pretty optimistic.
This image is at least 10 years old
It’s at most 9 years old, as it mentions Ubuntu 16.4.
Dude, a single chrome take is going to nom the fuck out of 2gigs.
That’s correct, but you can use such low end device as your home server with services like PiHole/AdGuardHome, Invidious, Vaultwarden.
One of my low end home lab server is running invidious (YouTube front-end) on Ubuntu server 24 and just using about 900 MB RAM.
But they put Ubuntu on it
“Ewww, Ubuntu? Honey, don’t touch it. We’re an Arch family.”
-No one ever
“We use Arch in this house, BTW”
Ah! Nailed it.
I mean I’m bit of an Ubuntu hater, not because its bloated or whatever, but because they’re too corpo.
I stopped using it back when they put Amazon in their start menu.
Me, a Debian Enjoyer but Ubuntu Hater: 👀
Ubuntu 16.04? Was this photo taken 8-9 years ago?
idk if it’s that old but it’s certainly not recent, ive seen this photo floating around for years
My search shows it’s at least as old as 2017
This is amazing. I’ve salvaged many older machines by just plugging a new disk and installing linux
My husband says eMachines have a pretty common capacitor problem. It’s an easy fix to remove and replace for people who know how.
Before selling, the capacitors should be visually checked, at minimum, because they can leak and that’s no good.
that’s most older electronics in some way shape or form, tho. i’d hope any reseller with space for shelves of product is doing a good look-over of everything they put up. or selling it with a disclaimer/nonguarantee.
All capacitors fail but items from around the time e machines were selling have capacitor plague and are thus more likely to fail.
It isn’t limited to just eMachines
Most of the Windows XP age hardware I’ve seen in the last few years as been dead due to capacitor failure.
$20 👍
The year of the Linux eDishwasher!
I was able to get Windows 11 to run on a 10 year old laptop through Proxmox. With 3 other Linux OSs running at the same time. With almost no issues. The Win11 system requirements are made up. It’s a way to sell more computers, that’s it. Line go up is all it is.
Yes, but at the end of the day you’re still running Windows.
Still a very inefficient OS
Oh totally! It took 5x longer to install than endeavorOS and Arch combined. It was really more of a test. I was just surprised that it ran at all on such low allocated resources given how inefficient it is! Especially since it wouldn’t pass the system requirements they allegedly require to upgrade from win10. I guess the point I’m driving home is, if you really HAVE to use windows, there are janky, hoop-jumping workarounds. It’s all getting wiped anyways. I’ll probably load LM or an Arch flavor for more fun tests later. It’ll end up as ewaste in a couple years anyway. The onboard vent fans are dying.
I know it’s not much to criticise over, but it takes like 4-5 restarts to install windows, and one to install most linux distros.
I had an exact machine like this, with these specs, just with an internal Nvidia GPU and 4 extra video cards added. Using USB splitters and USB audio cards, we made that computer work for 5 users simultaneously.
Built software for initial setup (what USB mouse and KB goes with what monitor?) and it worked like a charm.
There was even enough ram available to run a single virtual box instance with Windows XP (I believe) for one single user.
The Linux desktop was skinned to look like Windows XP too and for class rooms we used… I forgot the name, some open source classroom management system where the teacher could guide students remotely
Linux is awesome
