I’ve wondered this for a while now. I personally don’t upgrade until a machine fails or seems like it is about to fail, but aren’t there people who upgrade to a new laptop just to have the latest thing or because they want to run some non-free software with arbitrarily high hardware requirements? What happens to these still-working laptops that people replace? Not everyone is enough of a nerd to repurpose an old laptop as a file server or similar, so do people stuff them in a closet and forget about them, or do these machines become electronic waste? It seems like there must be a lot of these machines that could go to someone who could use one. Is there any sort of online or in-person place for donating laptops and other electronics? I know that recycling facilities exist in some places, and I know that there are secondhand stores, but what about somewhere to just give away machines that are no longer needed, or to sell them for only the cost of shipping? This seems important, but I’ve never seen such a thing. Does anyone here know of something like this?
(A bit of a ramble, but that’s how the words formed.)
When I graduated my highschool let me keep my laptop. I still have it, and it’s got the shittiest specs ever. But it is capable of:
That’s all I ever use it for, but it does it job well if I ignore that it no longer has a battery1, and that the screen no longer fully supports itself. I’ve been running linux on it since forever, and it just works.
Eventually, I’ll probably turn it into a simple static website or something. But that will only happen if it stops being useful for DnD because it disintegrates or something.