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What a cool space! Every community needs a space like this.
It's actually crazy, that we live in a world, where a computer that was mid to high-end 4 years ago, can be called obsolete now, because... windows 11 says it is? It doesn't make any fucking sense. All just to attempt to gaslight people into using secureboot
It's also pretty awesome that nowadays 4, 5, or even 10 year old computers are still totally viable to use for most use-cases, which would've been unheard of back in the 80's and 90's when hardware had such giant leaps in speed every few years. I'm loving that we finally have some longevity with hardware, and that Linux is able to actually extract that longevity from the hardware in spite of Microsoft's efforts to cut it short.
I have a 14 year old laptop running Linux Mint that I use daily. Sure, it's had the HD and the battery replaced, but it's still fine for most tasks. An SSD really improved performance.
My Thinkpad will turn 15 next year. It will probably be retired as my main laptop, but it will keep in bring useful in some fashion for a while still running Fedora.
Nice. Fedora is pretty damn polished
I can confirm the longevity part from own experience.
I bought several used Dell Wyse 5070. The 5070 was announced in May 2018 and used as thin client.
They're tiny, silent and you can fit a NVMe SSD via adapter in the WiFi card slot next to a SATA SSD. I picked the ones with Intel Celeron J4105 (Quad Core) with 1.5GHz, up to 2.5GHz burst and put 32 GB RAM in one of them.
Now I have a PVE (Proxmox Virtual Environment) running with several virtual servers, one 5070 hosts a PBS (Proxmox Backup Server) and both devices are far from their limit. In case of hardware failure I have spare 5070s.
Each 5070 cost around $65 and runs at around 8 watts at average.
It fits my needs and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Closer to 7 years for the newest unsupported machines.
And just because somethings obsolete doesn't mean it's unusable. Your CPU is probably considered obsolete and not getting security patches, but I bet you're still using it.
We've seen W11 be installed on one of the first ever x86_64 machines with enough success. Obviously there are missing cpu instructions, but the majority of requirements differences between 10 and 11 are just bs, and an attempt at forced obsolescence
I'm glad they are doing this in the middle of consoomer land. Hopefully they don't have any trouble getting these into people's hands and spreading the gospel.
Obsol eat deez nutz, Microsoft. Perfectly good computers which are still capable of performing plenty of useful tasks.
Obsolete for capitalism and their profit is what they mean.
Eat this Microsoft🖕
Power to the Gamers Nexus team, community, and Kramden Institution!🥳💪
The sooner we migrate from windows the better!
The rule that use to be the guide was that technology turned over 5-7 years (IIRC). These days, it seems that these companies are working hard to make it three years or less (look at Apple & Google releasing new phones every year or two).
Great to see Steve and the rest of the Gamers Nexus crew supporting the reuse of computers that shouldn't be out of commission.
Eh, back when Moore's Law was alive, it was easily every 2-3 years. Around 2010 we hit a wall with transistor sizes and CPU speeds, which saw the time between upgrades rise considerably. A gaming PC from 2015 was very capable 5-7y later. Vendors have been spending all the time since coming up with ways to get that back down to 2-3, especially EOLing perfectly good hw artificially quickly.
Moore's law was about the technology -- but I am talking about the application of the technology. It was unusual for most businesses to base their purchasing / refreshing decisions around the idea that the technology would be good for 2-3 Moore's law cycles. This was especially true back in the days of Mainframes and later "Mini" computers (shrunk down versions of Mainframes -- not Mini PC's) where companies like DEC and IBM went to great lengths to ensure that upgrading to a newer system didn't impact other operations in a business.
Most of this carried on with Vax and Unix Systems (like Sun workstations, SGI, etc.) in the same lifecycle.
When PC's started coming into the business world, the thought was that they would fit that same lifecycle -- and many of them did. This set the mark for early PC's when IBM brought them to the consumer market. The IBM PC was, after all, the consumer version of a business computer.
Apple, Commodore, TI, Atari, et al. were a bit different -- coming at things more from the entertainment, education, and hobby side of things.
I see what Steve is doing here is attempting to push things back towards the business lifecycle, and with good reason: it's better for the planet if fewer machines are abandoned due to the arbitrary whims of some marketer's concept of profitability.
Ah, i gotcha. The video at hand, and this whole thread is about the lifespan of consumer electronics, not really business refresh cycles.
FWIW - I'm not arguing about any of this... I'm just expounding on my thought process.
There were a lot of business class systems in the mix they were working on... I saw a bunch of Dell Optiplex, and HP Workstations in there... I think that was from either (a) some businesses / schools donating them, or (b) after market recyclers donating the ones they couldn't get working and didn't want to spend time on.
No matter what, however, the bottom line is that a high percentage of these systems will be given new life -- and that's what counts.
Business computers are definitely longer leases than mobile phones i can tell you that. consumers upgrade more often than businesses do.
well not the businesses that are built around apple devices.
Businesses tend to stick to a 3-5 year life-cycle. But I've gotten the feeling that even there they are cycling things through a bit more rapidly... It's just that they tend to do it in waves so it's not quite as noticable, or as big an impact to the budgets.
it hasnt changed much but at least theres a possible fear a lease might be held out slightly longer this cycle due to tariffs.
Just bought a refurbished thinkpad for $350 that has windows 11 because I need it for school and work unfortunately. My quite-capable-yet-still-incompatible-with-windows-11 9-year old chonky thinkpad P51 is going to be my Linux-only computer that lives on my workbench.
This is going to be a fun watch!
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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