My wife has asked me not to turn the house into a tech junkyard.
“What do you mean, ‘Why do I need that stack of old ThinkPads?’. They were free!”
I mean if they’re free you can always sell them for cheap and feel good about making some money while reducing e-waste
Usually it’s more a give away after installing mint on them, but it’s better than genuinely just tossing them for stuff newer than 7-8th gen intel.
Where are you all getting free thinkpads from?
We are trash pandas at your next companys trash bin. They follow like minions M$ directly into Win11 hell.
Make friends with your local IT guys. Thinkpads are less common these days, because they’re “Chinese”, so it is more common to find dells (which usually are worse in my experience).
Unrelated, but I just took apart my old IBM thinkpad from 2003/2004 to clean it up and get all nice and pretty for it’s last few years of updates. I also did my newer-ish HP laptop from 2016 at the same time.
The thinkpad was just beautifully laid out, with thought put into the placement of vents, heat sinks, heat generating components, alternative air pathways if the entire bottom was blocked, easy maintenance of components, etc.
The HP was …not. The weakest ass heat sink I’ve ever seen, miles away from the processor (no wonder it sounded like a wind tunnel when playing a youtube video). One intake vent where your thigh would be if in your lap and the exhaust right where your knee would be. Extra bonus was the placement of the CPU (running usually 80c+) is right above your junk, the vent being offset from the processor a smidge.
Granted I’m comparing enterprise vs consumer laptop in the days when there was a massive difference in quality between the two, but damn, this experience has me decided (again) that internal layout and design is just as important as specs, even more so if you need more powerful components.
And just think how quickly you can get them all up and running with NixOS! All those endless hours of learning finally put to good use!
Beats contributing to the documentation/wiki. /s
Who needs documentation? The code is self-documenting! The entire thing’s on GitHub, just check the issues to figure out what’s going on! Didn’t work? Sorry, the thing got broke a few months ago. Just go through the commit history and I’m sure you’ll be up and running in no time!
I’ve also made a module that fixes your specific issue and uploaded it to my self hosted gitlab instance. The server is down right now? Well, isn’t that better? Now you can make the thing yourself! Remember to upload your thing to your GitHub, name it something like “nixos” and never mention it anywhere.
Just put my custom flake into your inputs! No, I won’t give ydu an example on how to integrate it into your config. The Flakes schema is an incredibly easy concept to grasp, after all. /s
You can vibe code your config so now you have no excuse
Well, if you can’t figure out how to integrate the flake in 30 seconds by month 6, you clearly have a skill issue. Or a “sleeping at night instead of writing nix” issue. Better use a noob-friendly distro like arch.
Seriously though, despite all the flaws, there is no other packaging system where I can as painlessly use random forks of packages. I absolutely love how I’m able to run gnome-mobile on my x64 tablet. True to the NixOS way, I found the overlay on someone’s GitHub, there were only the files, no further instructions.
I also have a USB with live debian at all times, because you never know when you stumble upon a thing that just can’t work with NixOS
I really dig it as well, but hoo boy: the documentation still is… incredibly rough.
I’ve spent several evenings now trying to set up the development environment for a python package with additional binary file requirements (model weights) that I want to be included in the package.
It kinda works now with pyproject-nix, but I can’t manage to get an editable devshell running. And now it needs to unpack the requs everytime. 🙄
What do you mean the entire thing broke a few months ago? It broke only weeks ago, NixOS has the freshest breakages in the linux ecosystem
Who cares if it breaks? You can always just boot a previous generation! Need to rebuild without the breakage? You surely must now how to add a package from an earlier commit via flakes by now, right?
I’m just waiting for the moment I can update my packages (when all the unstable builds get updated)
Who needs virtual machines when I can just use a separate device for every distro I want to try?
Also: Openwrt is a kind of Linux. That can be useful sometimes, when I need 10 custom wifi routers…
Very true. Also, redundancy
Why would I need an enterprise router if I can have a superfast, very extendable, very flexible and redundant router with two old desktop machines?
Power efficiency.
that’s like stage 7-8, after an extremely high electric bill. Also about that time you consider moving to a colder climate so the electronics can just heat your house.
I kinda love it in winter mornings when I’m a bit chilly and then I kick off a big compile or play something and there is this lovely warmth flowing from my main desktop and then I make a big cup of chai.
and space savings and convenience.
I had 11 OSes on a single laptop once, including a vestigial Vista partition that was barely hanging on
I’d like to know where can i put my hand on a stack of free Thinkpads.
I have a literal suitcase full if 4TB SAS drives. Because they were free and pretty much unused.
Fun fact: A pelicase of 37 3.5" drives is the max weight you’re allowed in a single checked piece with common airlines. I had to give three drives to the check in clerk.
Seed some of Anna’s archive’s torrents. You can help preserve all of humanity’s knowledge with those
You’d be a fool to leave them!
Buy e-waste? I have people give it to me for free. Offer to recycle it for them.
Yeah this is basically what I do. People like giving me their stuff because I’m transparent about the deal:
- If at all possible, I will wipe it for you.
- If it’s usable, I will either add it to my TrashCloud™ or (especially for laptops) set it up for a kid.
- Parts/devices that I cannot get working I will take to electronics recycling.
- No iPhones/iPads.
Big thumbs up from me on the no iPhone/iPad policy.
That crap is ewaste as soon as Apple inc, decides it’s not worth supporting anymore with no option to load a different OS on it. Arguably, it’s ewaste before that, but I digress.
It just sucks that the hardware is made specifically to be incapable of running anything but the OS it was built for, which is entirely controlled by a profit-driven company by way of closed source software.
Say all the bad things you want about them (I certainly do), but it’s hard to say that their hardware isn’t good. It’s just sabotaged at the factory by their firmware and OS, condemning it to a mediocre and finite existence.
I love Lemmy.
I was wondering whether I was going to have to explain that rule to a crowd of angry zealots, furious that I could possibly oppose the Great and Mighty Apple like that.
I’m not opposed to having macs in my collection (though as it so happens right now I don’t have any), because it’s not about hating Apple and entirely about whether I can do something useful with the hardware.
A majority of the ARM hardware I have is old Android phones booting a pretty standard Linux distro with custom kernels. Most of them have drivers missing for various pieces of hardware, but as long as they can boot, connect to my homelab network over USB and run containers, they make excellent build/test devices.
It’s shocking how much corpos just ruin perfectly good electronics by making it busted from the factory
The classic
offers to recycle
actually installs esoteric Linux distros
Classic!
I have a laptop that I use regularly that I actually found at the recycle center when I dropped off some bottles. It is running Linux of course.
If you can believe it, there are some people who will straight up give you their e-waste, as if it’s trash or something!
Yeah. I have like 5 collecting dust. Should give them away (not us) but I’m pretending that I’ll set up a fake cloud service to try terraform (open stack maybe?)
I have 3 old cellphones that for the life of me, no matter how hard I tried - couldn’t install an alt android OS on it
One device was compatible - but I couldn’t unlock the boot loader
One device was never tested against any alt OSes
One device was carrier locked.
I also have one old Galaxy Tab that I spent weeks trying to flash another ROM to it - and it fails every time.
I’m 0/4 on trying to reanimate old android hardware - it’s just too difficult and too much hoops to go through.
At least I’m fairly capable with installing Linux on old laptops - and given that a new wave of Win11 compatible laptops is coming - I’ll get to do it more frequently soon.
I haven’t tried to do LUKS yet, and I’m dying to get my hands on a Yubikey and learn what I can make it do.
Mobile device flashing is a fucking alien world. Samsung products are not good for it, especially in the US.
The alt OS’s are mainly built against ancient hardware, and the SKUs that work are so limited that they’re not particularly cheap on the used market.
The best thing you can do is go fairphone or pixel and specifically get one of the models that is directly claimed as supported.
If you can’t get it to work, find the OS forums and hop in, someone will bend over backward to help you out if you’re nice about it.
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if the stack of shit laptops were dirt cheap or even free, and you are having fun tinkering with them…its still better than letting them rot in the soil.
Hot take
If the world was running on GNU/Linux for endpoints, tech-normies would still be using computers from 2010. And this would cut massively into laptop OEM’s bottom line. Therefore I think it’s a quiet conspiracy where laptop manufacturers or the computer OEMs shut up about Windows being bad because just imagine if everyone would be running GNU/Linux. You could use laptops from 2010 with “regular” distros and be completely fine. With light distros you could use things from the 1990’s for all tech normie tasks, web-browsing, text editing, e-mail, etc.
TLDR: Microshit Windows bad.
While I do agree that the Windows upgrade circle is vicious and manufacturers benefit from it every time they sell a new machine. It’s not the whole problem Linux needs to over come.
There is an incredibly large amount of sheer inertia that needs to be overcome. And that’s a lot harder to to break than the upgrade cycle because users don’t like change. It’s like a huge boulder rolling down a mountain. And while you can see little pieces of it chip off now and then. It’s due to the sheer size of that boulder that it ain’t stopping anytime soon.
It’s going to a lot longer before the “Year of Linux” ever happens.
In that thought experiment there are more scenarios. Remembering that stepping on a butterfly can change… This is, small input changes can have big repercussions down the line.
You cannot assume what Linux would be in that scenario.
Who knows if it would have been colored by a main corporation.
Capitalism would have found a way to leverage it and new computers would be sold.
Your theory is based on the assumption that only Windows/Microsoft software increases in bloat exponentially.
This is not true: look at the internet. For example Gmail used to have a basic HTML version, but Google killed it, and the normal version takes longer and longer to load even on new hardware. New Reddit also is a mess of over-Javascript-frameworked capitalistry, complete with those annoying grey lines that appear where text should be when the page is loading.
Even open-source software is not immune to this. KDE on an Intel Celeron/2GB RAM computer feels very slightly sluggish, like walking through an atmosphere that’s too thick.
Wirth’s Law states that as more features are added to a piece of software, it will become slower.
Before the arbitrary Windows 11 hardware restrictions, this was exactly what was happening on the Windows side as well. There are still tons of 10-15yo Windows devices around, happily running Win10.
“Regular” people also only upgrade their PC once the old one breaks or if they really encounter something that doesn’t work on the old PC (mostly games if they do play somewhat modern games).
In fact, Windows used to have really awesome long-term-support and forever long upgrade support. You can easily run Win10 on a quality high-performance PC from 2008. But with Win11, they just tossed all that in the drain.
It’s been a couple of weeks since i switched to mint and gotta tell you that this is very tempting
OP after trying Linux:

Unless you have an Asus m32cd_a_f_k20cd_k31cd motherboard. I’ve tried EVERY bloody configuration in the bios possible and several different distros, and they all crash / freeze during installation. Fuck you Asus 🤬
Just because you have OS install media and hardware does not mean the hardware functions. In fact, old hardware often fails MEMTST.
I’m sure that is often the case. But with this series, Its this specific model. A friend of mine has the Asus M32 from the previous year and he was able to get mint installed without any issues. Just bad luck with the model I bought. It’s always given me headaches so not being able to switch to linux tracks
Have you tried LibreBoot? Is that still a project?
That is a cursed name for a motherboard.
Gramps went musk off with giving weird names.
Sounds OEM
Would you rather Gaming Extreme MAX Torpedo Super Champ Grand Prix Haxx 2020 Ultra MAX Elite ?
After all, why not? Why shouldn’t I build a Beowulf of my own?
I first heard this term the other day, but it was in the context of “nobody does this anymore”. I looked it up and it sounds cool… is there any reason I shouldn’t consider it in 2025?
I looked into it a while ago but I gave up on the idea after realizing how few programs can actually run on one. There’s no “reverse VM” software that allows you to seamlessly combine multiple physical machines into one virtual one. Each application has to be specifically designed to take advantage of running on a cluster. If you’re writing your own code, or if you have a specific project in mind that you know supports cluster computing then by all means go for it, but if you’re imagining that you’d build one and use it for gaming or video editing or some other resource intensive desktop application, unfortunately it doesn’t work like that.
Edit: I dug up a link to the post I made about it in /c/linux. There’s some good discussion in there if you’d like to learn more https://lemmy.world/post/11528823
I mean you could, but kubernet/containers really help it not be needed, as you can just run on any hardware and it doesnt have to be the same stuff on all the systems.
These days people usually just call it a “cluster” w/o reference to the Beowulf system from the 90s.
The amount of compute you can fit in a single box w/o having to deal with distributed systems BS is kind of insane now though. You probably don’t need a cluster to do a lot of things you would’ve needed one for in the past – a single computer is often already good enough and way simpler to manage…
There’s about to be a lot more surplus hardware since Microsoft arbitrarily decided they can’t update to Windows 11.
And real good specs on most those machines, most will be at least DDR4 some even DDR5
My mom’s laptop self “upgraded” to win 11 a while back and she hates it and has been having issues nonstop. And since she refuses to pay a monthly subscription for office I set her up with Libre office. She’s been resistant to Linux but as I slowly add more FOSS apps she’s coming around. She’s now willing to try a Linux Mint live USB.
I’m going to be on the lookout for one of these perfectly good laptops and throw Mint on it for her so she can keep her windows laptop until she’s ready to fully make the switch.
if you want a LOT of them, govdeals.com is a way to go. You might hate me for showing you that place. Its how I ended up with a great generator for my house as well as too many servers.
We need to do a group buy. I don’t want 62 laptops, but there might be 61 other people that want one more laptop…
I remember that site, looked into it a few years ago when I was buying in bulk to resale stuff on eBay. Thanks for the tip, but I’m really just looking for one laptop.
According to a lot of Lemmy users, this is impossible. Linux never works and windows is solid as fuck. Never fails to work perfectly. Lol
Linux cannot even make the fans work most of the time. You would think it could at least do that. On windows they go all the time!
There’s a utility called ‘furmark’ that’ll fix that for you…
Someone told me on my previous instance, before it shut down, that no one actually used Linux, that everyone even me was just lying about using Linux.
Everything I have with DDR5 is running Win11. I have some DDR3 machines on Win10 tho. And of course DDR4. Just in my house I have three pretty decent DDR4 gaming rigs with compatible CPUs, SSDs, and nice video cards 3070ti and 4070ti, but the motherboard isn’t up to spec. I don’t like Win11 anyway though. I’ll have to figure those out soon I guess.
just start spinning up liveUSBs and trying distros out. I have my partner on Nobara and they seem to like it and it rolls in fast game fixes, and from what I was told if you sail the 7 seas you can still install them just fine with lutris and latest gloriouseggroll proton.
This is what gave me the idea. I started watching videos of people doing this with recycled hardware, and it looks so fun.
I would reverse the clown images so that the user starts as a clown and ends not one
Im strongly considering a decent into madness. Where should I start if the computer I will need to adapt is a 12 year old Macbook pro?
12 year old MacBook Pro? wtf, this is so greenfield. Some of the best Linux hardware ever.
MacBooks with intel chip are some of the best hardware to put Linux on, there are plenty of guides online on how to liberate your MacBook with Linux.
I tested a bunch of distros based on Debian, Arch and Fedora. By far, the easiest one was EndeavourOS just because it recognized the WiFi driver from the Live USB for me. Otherwise you will need to use a mobile phone with USB tethering to share internet so you can install the broadcom driver. Maybe things changed, but this was my experience in 2023.
Another driver you will need to install is the camera facetimehd . Everything else worked out-of-the-box for me.
After that, all the Linux variants I tried worked great, and it was mostly about distro philosophies and deciding the desktop environments (DE) I wanted to use, and that can be a bit overwhelming at first.
If that is your first experience, I just recommend to start with KDE or gnome. I find gnome works ok from the start, but KDE is easier to tweak. You can always test them from a Linux Live USB before committing them to your hardware. Steam Deck uses KDE for desktop mode.
There are others that are prettier or lighter you can test too: cinnamon, XFCE, MATE. Or even windows managers, but I would leave them alone until you are a bit more comfortable with Linux.
here are a few links in case some people need it in the future:
- facetimehd https://github.com/patjak/facetimehd/wiki/Installation
- https://boilingsteam.com/liberating-the-macbook-air-2013-with-linux-complete-guide/ (sorry for the plug, but it shows all my experience installing with an in-depth guide)
- https://endeavouros.com/
Thank you so much for this!
I just did a 2012 mac book air, well ‘just’ was probably 2023… but i digress
Ubuntu went straight on, just works, runs quickly. I’d have done debian which is more my go to, but I wanted to get the maximum level of community support and I think ubuntu has that.
basic instructions:
https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/create-a-usb-stick-on-macos#1-overview
or
There were a couple of fights:
I wanted to swap the function and alt buttons to match my linux pc’s, which was a special problem, because the FN key has its own special controller. There’s a page and a utility for it somewhere on the internet that lets you reprogram it. I doubt you’d want that though, since you’re already used to the layout.
The runtime on battery was awful, but it was a 4GB ancient Air. Out of the gate, I got a max of 2 hours, and OSX was getting 6-8 hours.
I installed TLP, twisted the governors WAY down, got it up to 4 hours while still usable. It still runs better in 4GB than OSX, just not as long.
Honestly, the Mac hardware is kinda rough for Linux. I run it on Lenovos and Dells and get 90+% of their normal battery life.
But it does work on Mac and runs quite well, even with very little RAM. I will say, you still need to throttle down that processor or they get a bit toasty :)
Thank you!
Disclaimer: I would start with an “eWaste” computer from eBay, so I don’t lose my main machine.
As someone mentioned, Dell Optiplex is a popular option.
We expect a flood of them (and others) to hit secondary used markets soon as companies offload anything that cannot run Windows 11 with secure boot enabled.
Disclaimer aside, assuming the 12 year old Macboom Pro is the secondary machine, the usual guidance applies:
- start with a distro that lets you test boot with a Live USB key.
- when in doubt, try Linux Mint first.
We love to debate the merits of our favorite distros, but when I was just getting started, I quickly discovered that most of what I wanted to try out actually ran on any distro. The only thing that varried was how many commands I needed to set each thing up.
This is the real pro tip. “Debian packages are behind” but you can just clone the repo or download the .deb and get the latest version of the tool you want. I know there can be dependency issues but I haven’t run into any with the stuff I use.
I have a 2008 macbook that I could try this with?
Nice. I would start by testing it with a Live CD.
https://itsfoss.com/linux-mint-live-usb/
The link above lacks instructions for creating the Live USB from the Mac, but I believe “Disk Utility” has a “restore from ISO” function that can write the ISO file to a USB key.
Alternately, I recall liking UNetbootin. Scroll down a bit here if you prefer to skip the commnd line answers - there’s plenty of graphical tool options, too:
https://superuser.com/questions/63654/how-do-i-burn-an-iso-on-a-usb-drive-on-mac-os-x
I had manjaro on my 2012 MacBook for a while. It dual booted even. So I guess Arch?
As someone running two 2010 MacBooks on Linux, most of it is straightforward but I would add a few notes:
-
It was helpful for me, as someone very familiar with OSes and hardware but NOT Linux, to pull detailed hardware reports off my Macs before I wiped MacOS off all the way, and to have the specs either memorized or within easy reach whenever I started reading the technical stuff, because there’s a good bit of that unless you happen to find a first distro that matches your hardware exactly. Instead, it’s more likely you’ll kiss some frogs before you find The One. Some distros are worth the trouble of making them work, some are not, but either way know your exact specs, especially for your wifi chip, so you can recognize them when you see them mentioned.
-
If you think you may ever run MacOS on them again, for any reason, but do not have another Mac handy, go ahead and make a MacOS bootable install drive now of the latest supported OS and throw it in a drawer. I never thought I would need it, but I did it out of an abundance of precaution and ended up using it multiple times, to my own surprise. But it’s damned difficult to do without another Mac around to create the install media for you, so cover your ass and do it anyway if that MacBook is the last Mac you have.
-
I made a GParted Live USB and it’s become one of the most used USB drives I own. No matter the OS, no matter the fuckery you’ve gotten yourself into (and clearly I have), if you can boot off USB it submits to the magic of GParted. Strong recommend.
-
Know that you cannot use Ventoy on MacBooks. At all. It kept crapping out on me, I spent hours on it, but when I read the forum (and the dev’s comments to others with the same problem) turns out that nope, Ventoy does not work with MacBooks. Don’t waste your time – or do, if your nihilistic enjoyment of futility needs a strenuous workout.
-
If you don’t already have a handful of available USBs, buy a ten (or more) pack of 8GB USB drives somewhere cheap, and just start rolling. They will all get used and reused as you go about trying out various distros and then comparing the ones you liked best, and you will appreciate not having to reformat the same USB every time you want to go to something different.
-
You’ve been told about Live USBs, but the thing with these older MacBooks is that a lot of it’s just a pure crapshoot when it comes to a specific distro making happy times with your specific hardware. Usually it’s the older Broadcom wifi chips, but I’ve had other problems. So when you boot into a live trial, you really want to make sure you’re testing ALL the hardware that matters to you (wifi, Ethernet, sound, mouse, trackpad, display, camera, etc) and not just assuming.
And even then it’s not certain: I just recently put Debian 13 with KDE Plasma on my mid-2010 MacBook and it sped through the Live USB trial and even the netinstall process on wifi, but as soon as it was running on the installed OS I had download speeds in the fucking bytes before I understood that the Live USB and the OS were using different Broadcom drivers. I found a guide and it was an easy enough fix, but definitely a pain in the ass. These things happen, so expect them.
-
Linux will recognize memory that MacOS will not, so go ahead and fill your actual motherboard capacity even if Apple says it’s unsupported. Chances are good you’ll want to upgrade other hardware as well; I’ve had good luck using iFixit for guides and it’s worth the trouble to ask around for recommendations on where to buy, but in general avoid Amazon, especially for batteries.
-
After you’ve installed Linux, run it on a stand for good airflow, open the case and really clean your fan, and/or replace your thermal grease (which it’s past time for anyway) because Linux does tend to run warm on these old MacBooks.
That said, these are excellent machines, a fun project, and honestly I think I like them more now than when I first got them: I never knew how versatile they could be. Hope some of this helps you.
Thank you so much. Im not terribly tech savvy but I have 2 macbooks that are just sitting there. I want a functioning computer and I don’t want to pay for something that spies on me constantly so that the manufacturer can steal everything I create. That means I need to figure this out.
I hear ya. I had to get away from MS for the same reason: I can’t have my PCs turned into data collection points for MS to make a withdrawal from whenever they like. But these old MacBooks are fire on Linux.
If you can successfully navigate the average Windows setup and you don’t have any non-standard partitioning needs you’re golden, especially if you start with a beginner-friendly distro like Zorin or Mint, both of which worked perfectly without further configuration on my 2010 MacBooks that have 64-bit Intel processors. You learn as you go along. I watched a lot of install videos too, especially when I knew I was working with distros that I knew were going to ask me for knowledge I do not now have (Arch, btw, and honestly the latest Fedora KDE that was insisting on Btrfs volumes for whatever reason and I was trying to do it without a working mouse, lol).
But that’s the cool thing about live trials: boot off the USB and test drive the OS experience, with no need to install anything at all until you’re certain.
Hit me up if you get stuck and I’ll help however I can. First, though, start with your Mac hardware: figure out what you already have. Then go from there.
-
Where does one find old tech on the cheap?
Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It’s also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department’s refresh cycle. Only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you’re willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.
When I first started learning PCs and Linux, I just went to the local thrift stores and Value Village. Even today people turn in all kinds of perfectly working compute hardware, mostly just old. Consumer stuff doesn’t retain much resale value and many cannot be bothered with trying to sell it, so it ends up in the dump, at the recyclers, in thrift stores, or on classified ads like Craig’s list, kijiji and the like.
EBay usually only sees the stuff that can fetch a worthwhile dollar.
My local dump has an e-waste section. Corps straight up drop off 6x6x6 ft. tall cage totes full old laptops and desktops. Then the grandma bins full of VHS players and stuff.
There’s signs saying you can’t take anything, but nobody actually cares or stops you lol. As long as you’re not causing trouble or making a mess digging deep into them.
Make friends with some PC repair people. Depending on where you live, a LOT of Win10 stuff is getting thrown out right now. If you present yourself as an alternative to recycling/scrapping, you might get a good deal.
I bought two old Thinkpads on eBay for $20 each. They run Debian + i3 great and have become my daily portable drivers.
Edit: a new battery and ssd did bring the total up to $100 for the pair.
Getting visibly annoyed whe you find out you can’t easily run mainline linux on some proprietary piece of hardware like a phone or smart TV.
But hey at least my robot vacuum runs on Ubuntu by default lol.
Wait really?
Yeah on Roborock at least, dunno if they changed distros for newer robots though.
Oh wow and it comes with Matter support for local server use!!!
My 1 dollar vacuum I got at a thrift store is still chugging somehow.
And Taco Bell drive thru, apparently

Trader Joe’s registers run Suse.

F
F
I
Fuck it, we ball
My vacuum proudly runs Valetudo!
Haha same! FIrst thing I did was make a soundpack and install oucher so it makes funny voicelines when it bumps into objects lol.
Only works for Roborock, right? Would love that for my bot, but it’s a Dreame.
Voice pack should work: https://github.com/Findus23/voice_pack_dreame
As for oucher, you’d probably have to write your own program or script depending on how Dreame’s bump works. For Roborock it watches a logfile for bumper events, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you can find something similar in Dreame or even something like /dev/sensor1 that you can poll.
That. Is fucking. Amazing.
This might be the single reason I buy vacuums of this brand on the future.
Windows: creates e-waste
Linux: undoes e-waste
Windows: creates e-waste
Linux: collects e-waste under the stairs “just in case it’s useful”
All the computers living under the stairs are running some server function. 🤷♂️
They’re heating the room too so technically it’s a radiator with network attached storage!
SmArt RAdiAToR!!
That was literally a hostname I gave one box I had in my life
We’ve been having short power cuts lately (rural area, windy!) and now it’s starting to look like my Dell Optiplex sMaRt RaDiAtOr 50w homelab/studio/shed heater could do with a UPS to protect against data loss! Though it does have btrfs raid1 which is pretty handy for a
radiatorRAID1ator!


















