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That sounds unreasonable until you realize that an 8th gen CPU isn't bad. Other option is to pay for long term support.
One-click Linux cluster. Local compute, NAS, or self-hosting. Be a shame if it all ended in landfill.
I understand that people need to be a bit more tech savvy to use Linux over windows but I reckon that KDE for example is really similar to windows (but actually much much better) and with the ai chatbots we currently have available I reckon any non-tech users would be able solve most of the issues with the chatbot’s help
The right answer is definitely not landfill.
Most people use their computers to run a web browser, maybe a word processor or media player, and... not much else. Even someone who has only used Windows can figure out those basics on a Linux desktop.
If the charities are unable/unwilling to provide support for Linux, they could give computers away on Craigslist before dumping more e-waste into our environment.
My wife's 90 year old grandma was able to pick up Mint with absolutely no issue. Just put the shit she needed on the desktop and that was that.
I did that for my grandmother with FreeBSD many moons ago, on a Pentium3 no less. It ran for years and years like a champ. Booted straight into PySol since that was pretty much all she ever did on a computer.
Even someone who has only used Windows can figure out those basics on a Linux desktop.
You'd think....
Edge is on Linux (bottom of the page). Throw a windoze skin on KDE and it would be like they never left.
Back in the day, there was a distributed cluster OS called Mosix. Even back then I had several spare computers lying about, and the idea of being able to chain them all together and have one virtual computer that would automatically distribute processing without special coding was enticing. It turned out to not work very well unless you did specially code for it, or clustered the computers very tightly with fiber; it just wasn't worth it.
But when I see piles of compute like this, a part of my still wants to network them all together and run ... well, whatever fills the shoes of OpenMosix these days, if anything does.
Some modern workloads can take advantage of multiple computers. You can usually compile using things like distcc and spread the load across them.
If you make them into a Kubernetes cluster you can run many copies or many different things.
It's still an unsolved problem: we still end up with single core bottlenecks to this day, before even involving other machines altogether.
This is the honest headline we deserve.