Beautiful Retro Rebuild — Windows↓ Linux↑ Dec 2024

I bought this laptop in 2010.

I put it aside, bought another laptop. Put that one aside, bought another.

Was going to recycle it; give it to the local church guys to refurbish for others to use.

Then I thought — why don’t I just install Linux.


Why am I sharing?

1  It seems newsworthy. These days, especially electronics items have a short life expectancy. Little premium is taken for maintenance and repair. The pace of change in electronics is intentionally hurried; that is, turnover is hurried.

2  Open source is worthy of celebration. The Linux OS has developed over the last third of a century. It’s development and maintenance is a public collaboration.

3  Linux itself: It is a widely used operating system (OS). The OS is used by Android phones, also the top 500 supercomputers, and servers (~95% of the top million web servers ). For smartphones and other mobile devices, Android leads with 72% market share, and Apple’s iOS has 28%. For desktop computers and laptops, Microsoft Windows has 73%, followed by Apple’s macOS at 15%, desktop Linux at 4.5%, then Google’s ChromeOS at 2.25%.

4  This is one of only a handful of successful (physically tangible) repair projects in my lifetime. The outcome exceeded all my expectations.

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Wiping the disk
Original stickers on my Toshiba Satellite E205
Wiping the disk
Windows 7 sticker
Wiping the disk
Erasing Windows
Wiping the disk
Linux installed — logging in !
Wiping the disk
Clean machine, cool look

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