Analysts have warned Windows 10 end of life plans could spark a global torrent of e-waste, with millions of devices expected to be scrapped in the coming years.
Research from Canalys shows that up to 240 million PCs globally could be terminated as a result of the shift over to Windows 11, raising critical questions about device refreshes and the responsibility of vendors to extend life cycles.
Someone should open a business taking free perfectly good laptops people were going to throw out, putting Linux on them, and reselling them.
Goodwill could do this with anything they get donated.
Free Geek here in Portland OR used to do this. Might still be doing it too, but I haven’t been back there since 2018 so I’m not 100% sure.
But yeah, the last I was there, you could walk in and just buy a refurbished laptop or desktop with Linux on it. They would even give guidance on what people needed if they weren’t tech-savvy.
I’ve seen this done. Store lasted for a bout a year, which is longer than I would have expected given the obsolete e-waste they were selling for extortionate prices. This was only a few years ago, but most of the laptops they were offering still had 4:3 displays and disc drives, that’s how ancient they were. Hell, one of them had a floppy drive.
That’s wild. There’s a place here in Melbourne that sells refurbished Dell Optiplex’s. They’re ~8yrs old and still perfectly functional machines. For $100 you can get a full setup with a 16:9 monitor, keyboard and mouse. If you’re on unemployment they’ll sell it to you for $50 so you can look for work online.
That seems like a much better way of doing things.
The I.T. firm I run does this except we donate them to nonprofits.