„No update? So no more forced restart? Neat“

This is a meme about enterprise equipment lifecycles.

Huge corporate entities with machine inventory counts in the hundreds of thousands aren’t going to give a shit about trying to upcycle old hardware - they just want it to not be their problem anymore.

My dad's friend was still running a 486 until last year. It did his spreadsheet.

Windows 7 is the only good version since XP, not even joking.

Thats assuming that people are actually going to throw their computers in the trash when the OS reaches end of life.

Most people running these old machines probably won't know or care.

Actually happen. An i5 with 4 cores + 8 GB Ram and a 256 GB SSD for something like 100 bucks. Years before we paid this for a raspberry.

You can get ARM builds of Linux. I have never tried them so can't speak to how well they work on a phone.

When I was a residential garbage collector, I saved close to a dozen computers from the landfill that just needed a quick cleaning. A lot of people will get rid of their year old Alienware once it fills with cat hair.

Doesn't mean it won't either - most people won't realise the computer is still usable, either by workarounds or installing a different OS - they'll either trash the PC, recycle or sell it. Or keep using it not caring that its complaining constantly that it's out of support. (And when they do, it's "how can I get rid of this annoying error" not "how can I update this?" - they probably didn't even read the error - and god forbid you manage to do the update, they won't like it if you do)

Hell most people don't even know Linux even exists, and a lot of them couldn't even tell me what their operating system name is.

I've had relatives that try to ask what's going on and say "I have 11" without elaborating that it's windows 11. I remember years ago my aunt said I have version 97. Referring to, at the time the totally unrelated fact that she had Office 97 installed on her winXP machine. Took me ages to work out what she actually meant.

Exactly. Just bought a Dell with an i5 9500 for €200. That'll be my new home server. I just hope more people get wise to how cheaply you can run a setup with a little bit of getting informed.

Y2K was a big deal, but it was well funded and successfully dealt with. Wikipedia:

The total cost of the work done in preparation for Y2K likely surpassed US$300 billion...

Well everyone is still going to be using Windows 10

Can i have them?

You should ask them again. Most companies just fear the ways the storage drive could be restored. Maybe they gave them away without the storage.

A couple of years ago we gave old core2duo out for free. I prepared them with dd'ing only /dev/zero over the storage. Should be enough, but replacing would be better.

Do you have access to businesses upgrading computers or shutting down that division? They tend to have some interesting stuff for playing with on Linux.