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!

  • Libb@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    What do you do with those low power machines though? Outside of being a text editor or maybe a low powered audio server i cant think of anything one would do. They definitely cant play games, I suppose they could emulate nes games.

    I don’t do anything with any of them. I just shared how I select and keep working the machines I need for my own use. I don’t collect them and I don’t own a repair shop. I say that but I sometimes ‘fix’ old computer for people looking to get rid of Windows or macOS… They often are surprised by how well their old machines or an used computer can work under a modern version of Linux to let them do exactly the same things they were doing previously, just without spywares and without all the crap.

    Like I think I mentioned already, it all depends what one needs out of that machine.

    I don’t play much games beside chess, which I mostly play over the board (irl) and sometimes online, on lichess.org and chess.com, two platforms where one doesn’t need a powerful computer in order to play. I don’t use my computer that much and mostly I use it to write, browse the Web, listen to music and play DVD or video files. The sole video game I seldom play (WarThunder, I played it 2 days in a row last week but had not touched for maybe a year, maybe more) works good enough with my old GPU.

    And then one should not forget that there is a wide range of secondhand machines available in-between what I would qualify as ‘obsolete’ computers (barely able to browse the modern shitty-scripts-filled Web) and the machines able to play the latest & most demanding games. It’s always a question of finding the right compromise between what one may want to have and what one really needs. At least, that’s how I consider it ;)