this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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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.
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.
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.
The I.T. firm I run does this except we donate them to nonprofits.