Monday, July 18th, 2011, 3:34 pm
GNU/Linux Saves Old PCs, Not Just Money
Filed under: It’s not e-waste until the hardware is dead
LOT of PCs that were perfectly fine 5 years ago were made obsolete not by dysfunctional hardware but by resource-greedy monopolistic and monolithic operating systems such as Windows Vista. This was bound to be a blessing to GNU/Linux, said one member of the Manchester LUG around 2006 when Vista was being finalised. He was right. Several years down the line, machines which were back then acceptable cannot possibly run the latest Windows, leaving GNU/Linux to fill the gap with its many distributions (suiting old and new).
Some machines, such as this one, come with Puppy Linux by default (I’ve just bought one to serve as a services monitor). There are other such machines that typically run GNU/Linux.
So yes, I’ve been checking about an extra unit to run a third monitor on. What strikes me as important is that the only two sites that I found so far [1, 2] both indicate that OpenOffice.org is a hot item even on Windows. With ODF and all, how would Microsoft feel? And to what extent will GNU/Linux benefit?
