The city (Brussels) falls short when it comes to preventing the waste of old but working PCs. Oxfam at Chaussée d’Ixelles 252 will only take PCs as old as 5 years. Generally if it has a Win8 or newer sticker, they take it. Win7 or older they reject.
Any PC can be dumped at C2fd (Quai Fernand Demets 54) regardless of age and they decide whether to trash it, sell it, or (I think) pass it downstream to Oxfam or Les Petits Riens. Looking at the machines on the shelves, there is nothing older than 5 years. It’s apparently getting trashed.
The mentality seems to be: if it can’t drive a version of Windows that is still officially supported, it’s trash. Yet I am working quite comfortably on a 2 core machine of nearly 20 years old, running a recent version of linux (used to write this post).
Neglecting business, there should be machines up to 15 years old on the shelves at C2fd, Oxfam, and Les Petits Riens with linux installed, and a “gratis” price tag (or nearly so). I don’t know what C2fd’s mission is, but Oxfam and LPR is they sell things to bring in money for charity. Is there no chance that the old (hard to sell) PCs could directly be put to use for their charitable causes, whatever that is?
In any case, with no business incentive for them to deal with old machines, the machines are needlessly going to waste. I have several PCs I don’t need, rescued from street curbs and too old for Oxfam.
Every public library with PCs has only Windows PCs. In principle, these 6+ y/o machines could go to libraries at no cost, which would give the public a way to experience linux. And what about schools? Are any schools in Brussels forward-thinking enough to have linux labs for student use?
The tech contractors working for libraries have user support phobia. They have made themselves unavailable and resist deploying any technology that triggers questions. So e.g, if wi-fi does not work with your equipment, there is no support channel (and they were not smart enough to support 802.11b and avoid captive portals). So they simultaneously fail in their mission to avoid creating a need for support.
What do you need usb3 for? In most use cases, USB 3 can be added. I have a usb3 expresscard in my laptop, which has an external power input from a USB port to drive things like USB3 external hard drives that rely on the USB bus for power.
USB drives for installing a new OS and loading up media. And also for doing backups of the data to a different media/location
Indeed usb3 is very useful for disk i/o. I wouldn’t treat it as a deal breaker though. USB 2.0 is good enough for OS installations, especially if you do a Debian netinst which uses minimal disc input (although USB 2 is perhaps still faster than your WAN uplink). For backups, it depends on the volume you are dealing with. USB 2 is good enough for small data and incrementals but if you have to transfer 500+ GB then you would want one of:
All of those buses can be added to a pre-USB 3 machine. But if it’s a laptop, the usb 3 expresscards may be hard to find locally because they never really got popular.