The headline is so very true. I can obtain written off machines from work at no cost, which have to be at least five years old to be written off (and are often a bit older), and repurpose them as Linux machines. They don't even feel slow when using them with Xubuntu or some other Xfce or LXDE based distribution.
Machines that are even older often get regular Debian. I have a Thinkpad from 2003 that was given me quite some time ago because it was 'too old to be useful,' and it works fairly well with Salix Fluxbox (a Slackware based distribution). People are surprised when I can play YouTube videos full screen on such old hardware using SMTube or some other specialized YouTube viewer software.
I can take underpowered netbooks with undersized SSDs that never ran Wndows properly, or were never able to run Windows newer than XP, and make them useful with an appropriate Linux distribution.
Of course the really underpowered hardware takes more knowledge to get the most out of. Still, the five to eight year old laptops and desktops don't. I have provided them to relatives who were happy to have them, and most of them aren't heavily into tech.
Another aspect of open source software is that it provides more opportunity to learn how computers really work rather than simply how to use them. If you learn Windows you learn how to use it and perhaps how to administer it. It's possible now to take Linux only this far and obtain a superficial knowledge of it. However, if you want to, you can dive into Linux or a BSD and learn a lot more about how your computer actually works under the hood. That type of knowledge translates to any system because it brings understanding. So, learning Linux or BSD will help you with whatever computer systems you have to deal with in the future. Learning Windows will do that only to a much lesser extent.
The headline is so very true. I can obtain written off machines from work at no cost, which have to be at least five years old to be written off (and are often a bit older), and repurpose them as Linux machines. They don't even feel slow when using them with Xubuntu or some other Xfce or LXDE based distribution.
Machines that are even older often get regular Debian. I have a Thinkpad from 2003 that was given me quite some time ago because it was 'too old to be useful,' and it works fairly well with Salix Fluxbox (a Slackware based distribution). People are surprised when I can play YouTube videos full screen on such old hardware using SMTube or some other specialized YouTube viewer software.
I can take underpowered netbooks with undersized SSDs that never ran Wndows properly, or were never able to run Windows newer than XP, and make them useful with an appropriate Linux distribution.
Of course the really underpowered hardware takes more knowledge to get the most out of. Still, the five to eight year old laptops and desktops don't. I have provided them to relatives who were happy to have them, and most of them aren't heavily into tech.