[Ipg-smz] eBay vendors selling used laptops with Linux Mint installed

Tue Dec 31 22:21:56 UTC 2019

Yes. Of course, it's marketing.

I'm just amazed by all the people who buy into the 'latest and greatest' 
concept.

This issue is even worse with cars. I was just given a 2007 Toyota Camry 
with only 37000 miles on it. It looks like models that are a year or two 
newer or a year or two older. There are still parts available. This 
thing should keep running for a LONG time if I take good care of it.

I have a friend at a body shop. By contrast to my Toyota, the new cars 
are stuck in an electronics feature war. Each year, the tchotchkes get 
better and better. But, according to a friend, replacement parts (at 
least, as far as body parts go) are extremely expensive - about $4K for 
a mirror on some cars, and on other cars, parts just are NOT 
available--or you have to wait until they ARE available. The dealers 
don't talk about parts in their ads.

I know of people who won't buy a car less than eight or nine years old, 
because of parts availability and parts cost issues. There's no Linux 
for cars -- if something fails, and you can't buy (or afford) 
replacement parts, you're in real trouble.

I plan to stay with my new (just broken in) 'old' car. It's reliable, 
repairable, doesn't have exotic electronics that change from year to 
year -- and it gets me where I want to go.

In 2018, I wrote an article on Connected Cars for Forbes Insights. It's 
interesting stuff - but we're a while away from the technologies that 
will power it, and even longer away from figuring out how to handle both 
the new,  compliant cars, and those that can't connect to the systems 
that run it.

On 12/31/2019 1:19 PM, Lynn Greiner via Ipg-smz wrote:
>
> It’s all marketing – it’s in companies’ best interest to get people to 
> buy new stuff so they maintain their revenue streams. Thus Y is the 
> “X-killer”. The world is littered with the corpses of last year’s 
> model, if you believe the hype (also, subscription and streaming 
> models are simply revenue tools – I’d rather have my movie on DVD and 
> not be at the mercy of some streaming service). My previous desktop 
> was retired after about 8 or 9 years, after it suffered a catastrophic 
> hardware failure that would have been too expensive to fix. The one 
> before it went 9 years and had to be put aside because replacement 
> parts weren’t available. Current machine is 4, I think – had it for a 
> couple of years before the other desktop died, since I needed Win10 
> for some things and the vendor refused to support Win10 on the old 
> box. I can run Linux on the new system too, of course – I configured 
> it with a ton of RAM so I could create VMs.
>
> *From:* Ipg-smz <ipg-smz-bounces at netpress.org> *On Behalf Of *Mark 
> Brownstein via Ipg-smz
> *Sent:* Tuesday, December 31, 2019 3:51 PM
> *To:* ipg-smz at netpress.org
> *Cc:* Mark Brownstein <IPG at brownstein.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [Ipg-smz] eBay vendors selling used laptops with Linux 
> Mint installed
>
> The whole issue of 'obsolete' has been a bit of a puzzle to me, too.
>
> Why is it necessary to get the latest and greatest? Why is a phone, 
> for example (maybe an iPhone 6 or a Galaxy S8) that was once the 
> latest and greatest -- and still works fine - suddenly obsolete when a 
> new model comes along?
>
> Why is Word 10 (which I use to teach a 100 year old nun, and usually 
> use for most of my projects) obsolete - even though it still works 
> fine for me, and meets almost all of my needs?
>
> The once state-of-the-art (or almost) Dell notebook that you wrote 
> about was hot shit a decade or so ago -- sure, new software may 
> require more resources - but this thing is still powerful, and will do 
> Linux Mint very well. With good desktop apps - and a lot of apps that 
> do things that are similar to the Windows or Mac apps (or some ported 
> across platforms to provide equivalent features and capabilities) - 
> why NOT keep an 'obsolete' machine alive and vital?
>
> This isn't quite like it was in the mid '90s when the Pentium or 80264 
> came out, and some apps wouldn't run on an earlier CPU.
>
> I've been thinking about putting Linux on one of my virtual machines 
> and taking it for a spin.
>
> On 12/31/2019 9:45 AM, Phil Shapiro via Ipg-smz wrote:
>
>       I've noticed several eBay vendors are selling used laptops with
>     Linux Mint installed.  I sometimes buy these
>
>     and  resell them to community members at cost.  I'm then able to
>     provide free tech support via my public library job.
>
>               In some ways my job is analogous to an open source Apple
>     genius bar -- although I'm given no scripts of what I can
>
>     and can't say. I just give people the best possible advice and
>     support I can.
>
>              Anyway, there might be an interesting story about Linux
>     finding its way into communities via eBay.  I can.
>
>     pass along the vendors names, if anyone might be interested in
>     running with this.
>
>              An interesting side angle to this -- the vendors would
>     not be installing Linux Mint if there were no demand
>
>     for it...  Another angle, I installed Linux Mint 19.3xfce on a
>     2002 Dell Dimension 4550 desktop this week.  Darn
>
>     computer feels pretty snappy to me. Without Linux, that computer
>     would be out of commission. With Linux installed,
>
>     it could see a few more years of use.
>
>              Too often tech professionals use the word "obsolete" as
>     if it were a factual statement, rather than a statement of opinion.
>
>     If you're a refugee from some war torn country, a 2002 computer
>     with Linux installed would be a dream system to have at home.
>
>               If your name were J.K. Rowling - and you were receiving
>     public assistance -- you could use such a computer to write your
>
>     first books.
>
>                     Phil
>
>     -- 
>
>     --
>     Phil Shapiro, pshapiro at his.com <mailto:pshapiro at his.com>
>     http://www.his.com/~pshapiro/briefbio.html
>     http://www.twitter.com/philshapiro
>     http://www.his.com/~pshapiro/stories.menu.html
>
>     "Wisdom begins with wonder." - Socrates
>     "Learning happens thru gentleness."
>
>     "We must reinvent a future free of blinders so that we can choose
>     from real options."  David Suzuki
>
>
>
>
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