Thought of this the other day. I bet a lot of us are like this, because in today’s world a lot of things we used to tinker with are gone (electronics are made to be single use and unfixable, cars are proprietary and can rarely be modified or worked on without many many thousands of dollars now, etc).
Sure, there are still hardcore electronics projects going on and people doing massive restoration projects and such, but i consider them basically geniuses, not just tinkerers who enjoy messing around and learning in their spare time while working 50 hours a week.
Im glad linux gives us a space to exist!
Cory Doctorow warned in 2011 of “the coming war on general-purpose computation.” Ordinary people being able to control their electronic devices is a threat to entrenched power, both governmental and corporate. Since he gave this speech we’ve been on a continual trajectory of all the major tech corporations giving users less and less control over the devices they use, both in hardware and in software. It’s only a matter of time before there’s an attempt to make it impractical to run Linux on a device of your choice.
This is one reason open-source hardware is so important. We need it so there’s always some kind of computing device we can run Linux on and tinker with. Otherwise we could be locked out completely in the end.
Holy cow, I’ve been looking for something like this!! I’ve been curious if our current state of everything being handed to us is resulting in less adventurous people who enjoy learning. I definitely see it in my friend group, tech being easy has made many of them super lazy and impatient.
thankfully cpu speed improvements seem to be slowing down so current general purpose computers will probably be still very viable in 10yrs time
That’s frankly been the case for a while now unless you’re a AAA gamer or 3d rendering or doing LLMs or something. I used a laptop from 2012 until 2022 then replaced it with a 2019 laptop (i9, Radeon 5600) which I’m using now and plan to use until at least 2030. For the vast majority of us that just browse, watch videos, use office software, teleconference, compile small projects, and the occasional indie game/emulator old hardware is fine. Consumerism makes you think it’s not.
Im still rocking a laptop from 2006 for light coding work & note taking lel
hell yeah, old laptops rock
Yes, I hang on to a number of old devices for this reason. Almost anything from the last 10-15 years can still be pretty useful if it isn’t broken. And when you install an appropriate Linux distro you see how fast the old device can go.