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!
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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.
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.
I’ve recently gone through a pile of ‘dead’ ThinkPads T410 at work, cleaning them up, harvesting usable parts and installing Kubuntu on them so people on the shop floor who just need access to online forms can use them.
I’ve been genuinely surprised at the utility they can still offer, despite being fairly low spec dual core i5 machines from 2010. Sure, no one’s gaming on them, but that’s not the point. They’re still useful.
